Willard Boyle
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.031032
It’s the birthday of Willard Boyle, who was born in 1924 in Amherst, Nova Scotia. Boyle studied physics at McGill University. In 1953 he joined the research staff at Bell Labs, where he worked at first on lasers. Bell Labs was interested in developing video telephony. As part of that effort, Boyle and George E Smith invented in 1969 a new way to capture and store images digitally using a semiconductor medium. Within a few years, their charge-coupled device (CCD) was being incorporated into prototype digital cameras. Boyle and Smith were awarded the 2009 Nobel physics prize for their invention. “After making the first couple of imaging devices,” he told an interviewer, “we knew for certain that chemistry photography was dead.”
Date in History: 19 August 1924
