Thirty years ago today, a computer scientist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) in Geneva snapped an image that’s become the stuff of internet legend.

It depicts a group of women posing in 60s-style dresses: a parody band made up of long-suffering partners of Cern scientists. Known as ‘Les Horribles Cernettes’, they performed comedy songs about their boyfriends’ many late nights at the office.

The ‘one and only high energy band,’ the Cernettes became famous in the physics world for songs like ‘Every Proton of You’ and ‘My Sweetheart is a Nobel Prize,’ which they performed at various Cern events.

A couple of months after the picture was taken, its photographer, then-Cern employee and the band’s composer, Silvano de Gennaro, photoshopped the women onto a baby blue background with a pink logo that spills just over the edge of the frame. This was an early version of a promotional image taken for the upcoming 1992 World Expo, where de Gennaro says they sang between Phil Collins and Tina Turner.

Spotting the image on his Mac, an intern asked de Gennaro if would mind sharing it for a software platform his boss was working on.

The boss was computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee and the platform was an early version of the World Wide Web.

Little did de Gennaro know as he passed over the file, but this was the first time anyone had tried uploading an image to this pioneering networking software. Or so the story goes.

Reprinted in newspapers and republished on news sites around the world, that early promo shot became known as ‘the first picture on the web.’

But, as the band has insisted for years — and Silvano confirmed in an interview with Metro.co.uk — this is a myth. It wasn’t the first image uploaded to Berners-Lee’s platform — and it’s impossible to know what was.

Something far more special

The photo is, however, arguably something far more special, as Silvano and his wife Michele — a founding Cernette — explained.

‘The web was created as a communication tool between physicists. Tim Berners-Lee wanted to keep it as serious as possible in order to convince the bank that that it was worth financing as a project,’ Silvano said.

So, it took some time before Berners-Lee decided the web might have uses beyond pure academia.

‘The picture that opened the web to the world’

Cern, which is based in a northwest suburb of Geneva, Switzerland, is home to thousands of employees — scientists and office workers from all over the world. Living at Cern feels like living in its own little international city with restaurants, kindergartens, coffee shops and bars, Michele explained. And with that comes a thriving social scene.

Eventually, Berners-Lee decided to create a webpage listing some of the extra-curricular activities available at Cern. His intern was the one that chose a picture of the Cernettes to accompany details about the organisation’s music club, of which he was a member.

‘In the way it was the first picture there was not strictly physics,’ Silvano said. It showed that ‘there were artists, there was life.’

If not the first image uploaded onto the web, he said, it can be defined ‘as the picture that opened the web to the world.’

Michele says she had no idea of the kind of impact the photo would have until she was contacted by journalists covering its anniversary, 20 years later.

‘It was just supposed to remain in-house at Cern, or so we thought when we gave the picture,’ she said. ‘When we started receiving phone calls, it was very strange… suddenly the Telegraph phoned and said, ‘you know, so how does it feel to be the first photo? And I had absolutely no idea.’

Even now, Michele says she occasionally runs into someone who knows about the band. ‘I recently met someone in Mauritius who was like, I can’t believe that I’m standing in front of you and I’m talking to you,’ she said. ‘It was just so sweet.’

‘It’s not just the Cern town that worships them’

The de Gennaros are incredibly proud of the Cernettes, and continue to keep in close contact with the band’s other members, who are now scattered around the world.

They put on put on a reunion gig back in 2017 and even managed to release a song at the start of the pandemic to raise funds for Covid-19 research.

The band, Silvano added, is massive in the physics world. ‘It’s not just the Cern town that worships them,’ he said. ‘There’s hundreds of thousands [of fans] because physics is a big community worldwide.’

They’re so popular because, to those in the know, the funny, romantic songs have an extra layer of meaning.

The lyrics of the ballad ‘Every Proton of You,’ for example, sound like a physics-themed love song. But they also describe the structure of the Higgs boson: the long-theorised ‘god’ particle finally discovered by Cern a decade ago.

Today, the couple say they’d love for the Cernettes to perform again if they had the opportunity. But it’s tricky to fund and organise reunions between members who’ve moved across continents.

‘A media for our lives’

As proud as they are of the band, they’re also proud of the small but significant role it played in transforming the web into a social platform: an early blueprint for the websites and apps we’re familiar with today.

As the Cernettes themselves describe it, their photo marks the day the internet shifted from a research network to ‘a media for our lives.’

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