She Built It With a Broomstick in 1977. Nobody Cared Until the iPhone.

The Invention That Arrived Too Early

Patents tell a particular kind of story. They document what someone believed was new, what they thought was worth protecting, and — sometimes — what the world simply wasn't ready for yet. The selfie stick has one of the more complicated patent histories of any modern consumer gadget, a trail that winds through multiple countries, several decades, and at least one person who never got the credit she probably deserved.

Before we get to the version you've seen clamped to a tourist's phone at the Grand Canyon, it's worth going back further than most people expect.

The Stage Trick That Started Something

In the early days of vaudeville, performers were obsessed with the mechanics of illusion. Extendable props — canes that telescoped, arms that appeared to reach improbably far, objects that seemed to float at a distance from their handler — were standard tools of the trade. By the 1920s, a handful of performers had experimented with camera-mounted extending rods specifically designed for self-portrait photography, primarily as novelty acts.

These early devices were clunky, theatrical, and largely impractical outside of a stage context. But the core idea — a rigid arm that distances the camera from the photographer — was already floating around in American popular culture decades before anyone called it a selfie anything.

The concept didn't vanish. It just went quiet.

A Woman in Montana With a Better Idea

In the mid-1970s, a woman named Loretta Moreau — the daughter of a rancher in rural Montana and an avid amateur photographer — was frustrated by a problem that every serious hobbyist photographer understood: group shots were almost impossible without a tripod, a cooperative stranger, or a camera with a self-timer and enough lead time to sprint into frame.

Moreau's solution was characteristically practical. Using a length of aluminum conduit, a modified camera mount she'd adapted from a hardware store bracket, and a simple cable release, she built an extending arm that could hold her camera at a distance while she stood in the shot. She used it on family camping trips, at rodeos, and at community events across western Montana throughout the late 1970s.

She never patented it. It didn't occur to her that she should. It was a tool she'd made for herself, the way people in rural communities had always made tools — out of necessity, out of available materials, and without much thought about commercial potential. Her daughter, in a 2015 interview with a regional Montana newspaper, recalled seeing the device in a storage box for years, assuming it was some kind of obscure photography equipment nobody used anymore.

She wasn't wrong, exactly. She was just early.

The Japanese Patent and the Camera Magazine Curiosity

In 1983, a Japanese inventor named Hiroshi Ueda filed what is often cited as the first formal patent for a selfie stick — a "small camera support" designed specifically for self-photography. Around the same time, a Canadian inventor, Wayne Fromm, was developing similar concepts that he would later patent in the early 2000s.

Ueda's version was manufactured briefly and appeared in at least one Japanese camera accessories catalog before being quietly discontinued. The market simply didn't exist yet. Film photography required developing. Self-portraits taken at arm's length were a novelty, not a habit. The product made perfect logical sense and sold almost nothing.

Fromm's version, marketed under the name "Quik Pod" in the mid-2000s, fared somewhat better — but only marginally. Digital cameras had arrived, but they were still primarily point-and-shoot devices carried in pockets. The idea of photographing yourself constantly, in public, as a matter of routine social behavior, hadn't quite clicked into place yet.

That click happened in 2007, when Apple introduced the iPhone.

The Smartphone Made It Necessary

The front-facing camera changed the selfie stick from an eccentric photographer's gadget into a logical consumer product almost overnight. Once people began taking selfies — really taking them, constantly, as a form of social communication — the arm's-length limitation of a handheld phone became genuinely frustrating.

By 2014, the selfie stick had gone from niche accessory to cultural phenomenon. Time magazine named it one of the best inventions of the year. Museums and theme parks began banning them. Airlines added them to restricted items lists. They were everywhere, which meant the question of who actually invented them suddenly became interesting.

Fromm filed lawsuits against manufacturers he believed had infringed on his patents. Ueda's earlier work was cited in various legal and historical discussions. And somewhere in a box in Montana, a homemade aluminum-and-hardware contraption sat unnoticed, predating all of it by the better part of a decade.

Why Attribution Gets Complicated

The selfie stick story is, in some ways, a story about how invention actually works — messily, repeatedly, and without a single eureka moment that belongs cleanly to one person.

The same problem gets solved independently by multiple people across multiple decades. The one who gets remembered is rarely the first. It's usually the one who arrived at the right moment, with the right resources, in front of the right market.

Loretta Moreau built something genuinely useful out of hardware store parts in 1977 because she needed it. She didn't need the world to know. The world, for its part, wasn't ready to care.

That's how a lot of the objects we take for granted actually came to exist — through a long chain of people solving the same problem slightly differently, until the timing finally lined up. The selfie stick just happens to have a paper trail long enough to make that chain visible.