It's National Selfie Day, Here's Proof The First One Was Taken In 1839
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) - June 21 is National Selfie Day. People around the country are celebrating the start of summer by grabbing their cameras, smartphones, and selfie sticks to snap a quick photo of themselves.
The casual self-portraits have become so popular in recent years that the word "selfie" is now in the Oxford Dictionary.
While the selfie revolution has gone hand-in-hand with the spread of smartphone users around the world, did you know the first "official" selfie took place in outer space over 50 years ago?
During his first spacewalk on Nov. 12, 1966, astronaut Buzz Aldrin is credited with taking the first "space selfie" while photographing landmarks on Earth.
Aldrin may have been the first in space, but the Library of Congress claims that a man in the 1800s actually beat him to the selfie record. According to their records and a portrait from 1839, this self-portrait taken by Robert Cornelius could be one of the earliest forms of a selfie in the history of photography.
Today, selfies can be regularly found on social media, as the CBS2 news team demonstrated Thursday morning to kick off the Selfie Day festivities.