Sunplaza

Model and actress Paris Hilton showed archival photos with singer Britney Spears taken in 2006. At that time, the celebrities were 25 and 24 years old, respectively, and then, according to Hilton, they started taking selfies.

In the three pictures posted on Instagram, the model and Britney Spears posed for the camera together. The main feature of a selfie is that it is taken by yourself, without the help of a stranger, so Paris Hilton used the camera (or phone).

“18 years ago, Britney Spears and I invented the selfie,” the actress captioned the photos.

Interestingly, the concept of “selfie” first appeared on Australian Internet forums four years before Paris Hilton and Britney Spears decided to take a photo together. This phenomenon became popular in the 2010s. The leading magazine TIME also noted that the word “selfie” was included in the “top 10 buzzwords” of 2012.

However, the first selfie was actually taken long before smartphones and compact cameras existed. It was taken almost 200 years ago, in 1839. The authorship is attributed to an amateur chemist and enthusiastic photographer from Philadelphia (USA) named Robert Cornelius.

He took the photo by setting up a camera in the backyard of his family’s store. To take the self-portrait, Cornelius removed the lens cap and then ran into the frame, where he sat still while the photo was taken. He then closed the lens to fix the image. This process was performed using the daguerreotype photography method.