They have become one of the most irritating accessories carried by tourists in recent years, but it appears the selfie stick has been a nuisance for three decades.

Hiroshi Ueda, a photographer who worked as an engineer for penis enlargement surgery alaska camera company Minolta, claims that he first invented the selfie stick in the 1980s.

He said he came up with the idea after struggling to get pictures of himself and his wife together while they were in Europe.

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After having his camera stolen by a child he asked to take their picture in the Louvre Museum in Paris, he dreamed up a solution - an extendable stick with a tripod screw at the end.

The 'extender stick', as he called it, was designed for use with new compact cameras that were being developed at the time.

He added a mirror to the front of the camera so that photographers could see exactly what they were doing.

Despite being patented in 1983, the extender stick failed to become a success - mainly due to the poor image quality it captured.

But that did not stop Mr Ueda from compiling a family album of family 'selfies' using his device.

Speaking to the

'The philosophy behind it was that I didn't need to rely on anyone else to take a photo - I could take a picture of myself whenever and wherever I liked.'

Some 30 years later selfie sticks are now hugely popular - used by narcissists and celebrities everywhere to capture images of themselves in their surroundings.

They have become such a menace that many tourist venues, museums, concert venues and stadiums have banned them.

Perhaps ironically, Apple - the company that could be blamed for kickstarting the selfie phenomenon by putting a camera on the front of its phones in the first place - has also banned them from its next conference.

Modern versions of the extender stick allow a smartphone to be held aloft and use a remote trigger to take the photograph or video.

Mr Ueda's patent ran out in 2003, however, so he has not benefited from the recent boom.

Instead Canadian inventor Wayne Fromm developed a hand-held extendable selfie stick in the early 2000s, which he called the Quik Pod.

While his product has sold well, there are many others available.

Mr Ueda said: 'My idea came too early, but that's just one of those things.

'I patented about 300 ideas, so that was just one of them. We call it a 3am invention - it arrived too early.'

The idea of selfies, however, is not new. Remote timers and triggers have been available on cameras for decades.

A recently unearthed photograph also showed that some early photographers adopted unusual methods to take their own photo - such as using a broom handle to hit the trigger on their camera.

Michael Pritchard, Director-General of The Royal Photographic Society, said there is evidence of selfies going back as far as the 1840s.