Richard BodinHave you ever wondered what was the first photo ever uploaded on the web? Le Baiser by Robert Doisneau? Man on the Moon, maybe ? Nope… Nothing like that. Have you ever heard of Michele de Gennaro, Angela Higney, Colette Marx-Nielsen and Lynn Véronneau? Probably not… Maybe you heard about Les Horribles Cernettes? This girl band, founded in Geneva around 1989, made history in 1992 when their picture was the first photo ever uploaded on the World Wide Web…
How a Love Song Sparked a Legend
The story began in 1989 when a young secretary at the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) was tired of waiting for her physicist boyfriend. He was working with the Large Hadron Collider —only the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator— which requires constant monitoring. So physicists on that team were sharing day and night shifts. When computer scientist Silvano de Gennaro decided to set up the Hardronic music festival, to entertain the CERN population, this sparked an idea for the young secretary.
She ran her idea by Silvano about a song to catch her physicist lover’s attention and sing it on stage at the festival. Eager, he wrote the lyrics for “Collider”, filled with physics witty jokes, and the music, inspired by 60s doo-wop bands. He hired his girlfriend and another colleague of hers to sing alongside the secretary. The Cernettes were born, although the girl band didn’t have a name at this point. The performance was supposed to be a one off, just for the craic. But legend goes that the boyfriend-physicist never saw the performance: he was on shift.
CERN’s High Energy Divas
It worked so well, that a lot of people came back to de Gennaro afterwards asking for more. So the band began regular performances. They chose a name with a wink to the famous collider: Les Horribles Cernettes, sharing the same acronym. The girl band which started as a joke, went on to be invited to international physics conferences, or to the 1992 Universal Exposition in Sevilla, and to George Charpak’s Nobel Prize party.
In 1992, as the Cernettes were getting ready for a show —big hairdos, and makeup with a 50s trend— Silvano entered the room with his Canon EOS 650: “Okay girls, give me a shot for the album cover”. Michele, Angela, Colette and Lynn eagerly posed, not knowing they were about to make History. A few days later, as Silvano was working on the album cover in his office, Tim Berners-Lee came in to install a new version of web server software on the mainframe, which de Gennaro was in charge of.
Enter Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Now, you may wonder who Sir Tim Berners-Lee is: he is the inventor of the World Wide Web, and revolutionised the way we communicate since 1991. For the bunch of Know-It-All over there in the back —yes you!— of course Internet already existed before, but it consisted in a multitude of interconnected networks to share data. TimBL only came up with a system to make it all work together, and accessible to everyone. To do so, he created —among other things— a new protocol (HTTP), and a common markup language (HTML) readable by this new thing he invented: the web browser. He basically invented the web as we know it today.
As he sees the picture of the Cernettes on de Gennaro’s screen, he tells him he should make them a website. “A web-what now?”… Even though they both work at CERN, he only has a vague idea of what TimBL is talking about. Ultimately, he scanned the photo and sent it to the web inventor’s FTP server at info.cern.ch. A few days later, TimBL was publishing a new page on the CERN’s website, about the organisation’s clubs and other free time activities, featuring Les Horribles Cernette and their picture. It was only the size of a stamp, as it took forever back then to download an image, and you had to actually click in the image icon to be able to see it.
History in a Stamp-Sized Gif
History was made. The first picture ever uploaded on the web. Well, not exactly the first. The web being a system already used so far for academic purposes, a few hundred images had already been shared. But they were technical, research related pictures. The photo of the four girls was the first social photo uploaded, shared for fun and nothing work related. Without realising it, Les Horribles Cernettes became iconic. At the time of the webpage publication, they were reaching more people by displaying a poster in the hallway of the CERN offices than on the web. But in 2012 when they reunited for a concert, the webcast hit 2000 people watching online.
How the Cernettes Became Digital Pioneers
Les Horribles Cernettes became the first band ever to have their page and their faces on the Web. This little webpage opened the web to anything fun. Tim Berners-Lee was proud of his invention, and he quickly saw the potential of this new media, beyond the purely academic use. And sure enough a couple years later, in 1994, the first digitised song was made available online. Electronic duo The Future Sound Of London (Garry Cobain & Brian Dougans) premiered their new single “Lifeforms”, featuring Cocteau Twin’s Elisabeth Fraser, on 22 June 1994 on the internet bulletin board SonicNet. A week later, Geffen Records was making Aerosmith’s “Head First” available for public download on the CompuServe network.
This was only the beginning. The first of many social uploads. The first of many bands online. Today we share pictures and music to anyone around the planet like it is the most natural thing to do with the flick of a finger…
