For emission spectroscopy has been a thing since 1859 when Gustav Kirchhoff figured it out but for stellar emission spectroscopy it was Joseph von Fraunhofer in early 1800s? Although 1866, Pietro Angelo Secchi may have also discovered stellar emission spectroscopy 1848.
That's somewhat misleading though. It's not really a pixel in that there's much more information available than, basically, 3 integers between 0 and 255. There's 4 instruments on the telescope that collect 4 different chunks of IR spectra, and there's very precise and granular intensity values for light received around any given wavelength. Much more detail than a "pixel" has in the typical sense we use them.
It's not a lot of information, not nearly enough to identify surface features on an exoplanet, but it's very useful data if you're trying to identify likely chemical composition of bodies or how hot clouds of gas are.
It's a crude analogy, but I like to tell people that a spectroscope is more like a highly directional microphone to listen to molecules than it is like any normal camera...
This is an easier problem than it probably seems. Atmospheres are relatively low-density gas, which means they produce an absorption spectrum - a chemical fingerprint that identifies most atoms and molecules quite reliably. It's such a good fingerprint that it was used to discover several chemical elements, most notably helium (observed in the Sun's spectrum before it was known on Earth).
An amazingly long time ago.