Long before it got featured in a magazine in 1995; SELFIE STICK already existed since 1980.The founder is a Japanese man called Hiroshi Ueda. He was inspired to create this tool after he felt that he could not always rely on others to take the photos of himself during his trips to tourism spots.
The story goes like this. At that time, Hiroshi asked for a child’s help to take the photograph of him and his wife in front of the Louvre Museum in Paris. Instead of obtaining a satisfying photo, he lost his camera because the child ran away with it. Such bad experience during his vacation made him think of creating a stick with a screw to put the tripod on its edge.
At that time, it was not called SELFIE STICK like most of us recognize it today. He called in “EXTENDER STICK”. This tool was designed to allow the user to use it for pocket camera which was developed then.
Back in those days cameras were unlike ones we have in our Smartphone. They did not have front facing camera that was why he added a mirror in front of his so that the photographer who took photos would be able to see the position and expression taken on them.
In 1983, Hiroshi made the patent right for his creation but he failed to succeed because images captured using this stick did not come out satisfying as far as its quality is concerned. However, he still used it to create album of his family photos.
Minolta also produced Ueda’s “extender stick”. Unfortunately, the sale was disappointing because it was considered weird added some other minus factors by the public.
He stated “My idea came too early, but that’s just one of those things. I patented about 300 ideas, so that was just one of them. We call it a 3am invention – it arrived too early.”
Well, it needs years to finally let Smartphone emerges before the SELFIE trend rises to make people start using SELFIE stick. A founder from Canada called Wayne Fromm succeeds in his attempt to capitalize the SELFIE trend that gets very popular these days by producing a SELFIE stick called “Quik Pod” in the middle of 2000’s decade. Since then SELFIE stick thrives and spreads fast like a virus all over the world.
