Miscellany
Philadelphia chemist Robert Cornelius took what is widely believed to be the first “selfie,” in the back of his family shop, by removing the camera lens cap, running into the frame, and then replacing the lens cap. On the back of the photograph he wrote, “The first light picture ever taken. 1839.” Three-quarters of a century later, Russia’s grand duchess Anastasiya Nikolayevna took a series of self-portraits, steadying herself on the back of a chair. “I took this picture of myself looking in the mirror,” she wrote in 1914, four years before her execution. “It was very hard, as my hands were trembling.”