Selfie stick

A selfie stick is a monopod used to take selfie photographs by positioning a smartphone or camera beyond the normal range of the arm. The metal sticks are typically extensible, with a handle on one end and an adjustable clamp on the other end to hold a phone in place. Some have remote or Bluetooth controls, letting the user decide when to take the picture, and models designed for cameras have a mirror behind the viewscreen so that the shot can be lined up. In contrast to a monopod for stabilising a camera on the ground, a selfie stick's arm is thickest and strongest at the opposite end from the camera in order to provide better grip and balance when held aloft. Safety concerns and the inconvenience the product causes to others have resulted in them being banned at many venues, including all Disney Parks, both Universal Studios Orlando and Hollywood.

Homemade selfie sticks could date back as early as 1925. A photo from that year shows a man taking a photograph of himself and his wife, with the aid of a long pole which is pointed towards the camera and out of frame. Amateur box cameras of the period would not have been able to capture a self-portrait in focus when held at arm's length, requiring photographers to use remote shutter devices such as cables or sticks.

A device which has been likened to the selfie stick appears in the 1969 Czechoslovak sci-fi film I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen. One character holds a silver stick in front of herself and another character, smiles at the end of the stick as it produces a camera flash, and immediately unfurls a printed photograph of the pair from the stick's handle.

The 1983 "Minolta Disc-7" camera had a convex mirror on its front to allow the composition of self-portraits, and its packaging showed the camera mounted on a stick while used for such a purpose. A "telescopic extender" for compact handheld cameras was patented in U.S. in 1983, and a Japanese selfie stick was featured in a 1995 book of "101 Un-Useless Japanese Inventions". Canadian inventor Wayne Fromm patented his Quik Pod in 2005 and becoming commercially available in the United States the following year. In 2012, Yeong-Ming Wang filed a patent for a "multi-axis omni-directional shooting extender" capable of holding a smartphone, which won a silver medal at the 2013 Concours Lepine. The term "selfie stick" did not become widely used until 2014. Extended forms of selfie sticks can hold laptop computers to take selfies from a webcam.

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