Woodrow W. Bledsoe, Helen Chan, and Charles Bission, computer scientists, pioneered facial recognition nearly 50 years ago. From 1964–1966, Bledsole, Chan, and Bisson attempted to program computers to recognize faces. Bledson was the leading researcher and is known to be one of the founding fathers of facial recognition. The experiment included the following: "Using a Graftcon or Rand tablet, the operator would extract the coordinates of the feature, such as the center of the pupil, the inside of the corner of the eye, the outside corner of the eye, points of the window peak, and so on" (Bledsole, 1966). Their research was limited as they used handmade proportions, which were then transferred to a computer and compared to various faces from different angles and distances. Bledosle concluded the experiment as a failure: "The facial recognition problem is made difficult by the great variability in head, rotation, and tilt, lighting intensity, and angle of facial expression, etc.."
The National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Defense Advanced Research Project laid the groundwork for automatic facial recognition. By the 1990s, they could rely solely on computer programming to expand databases. In 2010, Facebook started to use facial recognition to automatically tag users identified in the photo. In 2011, Android allowed users to unlock their phones with their faces. However, it wasn't as accurate because it relied on 2D pictures stored on your device, so when you wore a mask or changed your appearance, the system wouldn't be able to recognize your face. In 2017, Apple became the first company to develop effective facial unlocking technology with the iPhone X.