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| Les Horribles Cernettes, a comedic musical group at CERN, strike a pose in the first photo ever to be uploaded to the Internet. (Silvano de Gennaro) |
Two decades
before scientists at CERN announced they had likely found the Higgs boson, the
Geneva-based particle physics lab made history with a little less fanfare.
That's when
a promotional photo of Les Horribles Cernettes, a comedic musical group
composed of girlfriends and secretaries of CERN scientists, became the first
photo ever to appear on the Internet. It was posted 20 years ago this week.
While only a handful of people saw it then, the photo is now having something
of a revival.
Silvano de
Gennaro, an I.T. developer at CERN who was also manager of the Cernettes,
snapped the photo while backstage at a music festival organized by the lab's
administrators. He edited it using the first version of Adobe Photoshop, and
saved it as a GIF file on his Macintosh.
After
Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee, also working at CERN at the time, developed a
new version of the World Wide Web that supported photos, he uploaded the
Cernettes photo to what might be called the first ever band website — a page on
the CERN website devoted to its musical acts.
"Tim passed by my office and said, 'Can I
have it? I want to put it on the Web,'" de Gennaro said. "I hardly
knew what the Web was. I knew it was an information exchange system used by
physicists."
The exact
date of the photo's publication is a bit murky, de Gennaro said. Berners-Lee
was working on the code that would allow photos to render online when he got
the photo from de Gennaro's floppy disk, so the photo likely appeared on the
Web and came on several times before the code was finalized.
De Gennaro,
now married to original Cernette Michele de Gennaro, wrote the group's songs,
which include "My Sweetheart is a Nobel Prize" and "Every Proton
of You." The photo was intended as a CD cover for an album the group was
producing, he said.
Michele de
Gennaro said she had forgotten about the photo when her husband told her, years
after it was taken, that it had made history.
"We
were just racing to get onstage, and Silvano said to strike a pose, so we
did," she said.
Berners-Lee
became a fan of the group after befriending former member Colette Marx-Nielson,
who told Vice that Berners-Lee was known to dress as a woman in an "amateur
operatic society" at CERN.
"I
kinda put it out sometimes and say, 'Well, I'm in the first photograph on the
World Wide Web,'" she told Vice. "People don't really care. I suppose
it had to be somebody, and it just happened to be us."
While the
Cernettes began as a joke, they were so successful that they kept performing,
with various personnel changes, for more than 20 years, Silvano de Gennaro
said. But with his recent retirement and imminent move from Switzerland, the
band is bidding the lab farewell.
The
Cernettes will play a final concert at CERN on July 21.
"Recalibration of Knowledge" – Jan 14, 2012 (Kryon channelled by Lee Carroll) - (Subjects: Channelling, God-Creator, Benevolent Design, New Energy, Shift of Human Consciousness, (Old) Souls, Reincarnation, Gaia, Old Energies (Africa,Terrorists, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela ... ), Weather, Rejuvenation, Akash, Nicolas Tesla / Einstein, Cold Fusion, Magnetics, Lemuria, Atomic Structure (Electrons, Particles, Polarity, Self Balancing, Magnetism, Higgs Boson), Entanglement, "Life is necessary for a Universe to exist and not the other way around", DNA, Humans (Baby getting ready, First Breath, Stem Cells, Embryonic Stem Cells, Rejuvenation), Global Unity, ... etc.) - (Text Version)
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