Dr. George Elwood Smith, one of the co-inventors of the CCD image sensor who played a pivotal role in the development of digital photography, passed away last week at his home in New Jersey. He was 95.
The Washington Post reports that Dr. Smith died on May 28, as confirmed by Smith’s son, Carson.
In 1969, when a researcher at Bell Labs, Smith and his colleague, Willard S. Boyle, sketched out an idea on a blackboard that would later become the first digital image sensor, the charge-coupled device, or CCD.
Without the CCD sensor, it is impossible to say with confidence that digital photography would be anywhere near the technological level it is at now. While CCD sensors have largely vanished from mainstream digital cameras, nearly all of which sport CMOS sensors, CCD sensors remain in use in deep space photography, medicine and science, and other specialized applications. The world’s largest camera, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), is preparing to capture its first 3,200-megapixel photos of the Universe in Chile — and its powered by 189 high-resolution CCD image sensors.
Smith and Boyle were remarkably vital to the birth and development of digital photography, an honor for which they won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009. It is worth noting here that while Smith and Boyle won the Nobel Prize, their colleagues Eugene Gordon and Mike Tompsett claim that they were more important in steering the Nobel Prize-winning research toward imaging applications. Smith rejected Tompsett’s claims in late 2009.
“The ability to store images in a digital format is an important prerequisite for information technology. In 1969 George Smith and Willard Boyle sketched an electronic memory design, but their concept instead became the basis for a light sensitive charge coupled device, or CCD. In the sensor there is a grid of light sensitive cells that emit electrons when exposed to light, causing the cells to become electrically charged. When a voltage is applied to the cells, electrical signals are generated, which are used to build up a digital image. CCD was a breakthrough for digital camera technology,” The Nobel Prize explained in 2009.
In a 2001 interview with IEEE History Center, George E. Smith described the power of the CCD sensor:
“Here is the best photographic film of one portion of the universe. That’s a CCD picture taken from the Hubble telescope at about a factor of 100 times greater sensitivity than the best photographic film,” Smith told the interviewer, David Morton. “The major thing is the quantum efficiency. You can close to 80 percent quantum efficiency in a CCD. What you want is a photon to come in, and for every photon to make one electron that you can count.”
“With the good CCDs, eight out of ten photons coming in would make an electron that can be read out and counted. With the photographic film a hundred photons need to come in before it breaks one of the bonds in the silver halide so that can be developed,” Smith continued.
Originally, Smith and the rest of the team were working to create a video-based telephone using the CCD — an idea that would ultimately require decades more work to become a reality. It was not until the CCD patent was registered a few years later that people realized its implications for photography.
Eastman Kodak debuted a prototype digital camera in 1975 based around the CCD. The creator, Steve Sasson, recounted his creation to PetaPixel in 2022. Sasson’s boss told him he could model exposure control for XL movie cameras or “look at this new charge-coupled device.”
“I was in the electronics group — as I was an electronics engineer. It was a new type of device that we had not worked with before. It had to do with a two-dimensional exposure surface, much like a film, but it was all electronic,” Sasson told PetaPixel. Two years later, Sasson invented the first digital camera, and it was made possible in large part because of George E. Smith.
Sasson demonstrated the potential of the CCD sensor for digital photography, and as they say, the rest is history. While it took quite a bit longer for digital cameras to become mainstream for consumers and professional photographers, it did not take much longer for CCD sensors to capture important photographs. Astronomers began using CCDs on Earth-based telescopes by the late 1970s, and the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, was equipped with CCD sensors.
George Elwood Smith was born in White Plains, New York, on May 10, 1930. Following his career at Bell Labs, from which Smith retired in 1986, he spent nearly two decades sailing the world with his partner, Janet Murphy, who passed away in 2020. Smith’s wife of 20 years, Janet Carson, died in 1975. Smith is survived by three children, many grandchildren, and two sisters. His Nobel Prize co-winner, Eugene Gordon, in his native Nova Scotia in 2011.
Image credits: Portrait of George E. Smith by U. Montan, The Nobel Foundation. Image of CCD sensor by Dave Jones, licensed via Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.
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