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The Word "Pixel" Was First Printed in 1965 by a JPL Engineer Processing Space-Probe Photos
Richard Lyon traced the first printed use of pixel to two 1965 SPIE papers by Fred Billingsley of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Billingsley didn't claim to coin it, and the word was confused from its first appearance.
Lyon’s search started at the dictionary.
The Oxford English Dictionary dated pixel to a 1969 article in Science, “Mariner 6 Television Pictures: First Report.” Lyon found that unsatisfying and wrote to the authors. The one he could reach, atmospheric scientist Andrew T. Young, was “mildly horrified” to be tied to the word.
“I thought it was a vile neologism, and tried to avoid it myself,” Young told him. “It was in use by the guys in the Image Processing Lab.”
So Lyon went to the Image Processing Lab. Through Jerry Solomon of Caltech, he reached Fred Billingsley, retired from the lab, in 2002. Billingsley recalled pixel coming from a subcontractor, “probably the Link Division of General Precision in Palo Alto, by 1964 or earlier.”
Then, Lyon writes, “Shortly thereafter, Fred died, leaving me with only that clue.”
The clue led to Keith E. McFarland, who had built a Video–Film Converter for JPL at Link. McFarland pulled the machine’s 1966 and 1967 manuals “out of his barn in Oregon.” Both used pixel without defining it. McFarland said the word was “in use at the time,” and that they did not invent it at Link.
That’s how Lyon finally landed on Billingsley’s 1965 papers. The first, “Digital Video Processing at JPL,” ran in SPIE Vol. 3 from an April 1965 meeting in Los Angeles. The second, “Processing Ranger and Mariner Photography,” came from an August 1965 meeting in San Francisco. Ranger and Mariner were the space probes. Both papers carried the same photo of Billingsley and technician George Peterson with the Link converter.
The confusion never really left. Lyon traces camera pixels back to 1982, when Hitachi researchers applied the term to the single-color elements of a color sensor. That, he writes, began “the use, prevalent today, of the term pixel for a sensor element that measures only one-third of the information needed to make a color (RGB) pixel.”
Lyon had a stake in that fight. He wrote the paper while at Foveon, whose sensors stacked three color layers. Foveon and Sigma called the SD9 camera “3.4 megapixels x 3,” and many retailers shortened it to 3.4 MP.
Lyon closes his own paper with a hedge: “My ‘first’ claims are all based on only what I could find.” Billingsley’s trail ends at Link, and McFarland says Link didn’t coin it either. Somebody said pixel out loud before 1965, and nobody has found who.