Happy CCD Birthday

I give you, rather a couple of Nobel Prize Winning Physics whiz kids gave us the Charged Coupled Device or CCD for short. Nikon loves these little things and Canon moved to CMOS some time ago.

Although I could not nail down the exact date by my limited research today, I was listening to a TWIP (This Week In Photography) podcast and they made mention of it. So I am dedicating today as recognition of two dudes back in 1969 that came up with a little device that could store energy on a big scale.

George Smith and Willard Boyle

There are the two geniuses, Really! George Smith and Richard Boyle. These guys spent a bunch of time with Bell Labs, you know, the place for the most technogeek people to hang around and come up with really cool stuff. The kind of stuff that either never makes it to the public because the military nabs it or it was a fizzle or stepping stone to something better.

Such was the case for the CBD. That's right in 1967 another Bell Labs pocket protector geek (I say that with all due respect) by the name of Andrew Bodeck was working on expanding the size of memory devices. The Charged Bubble Device was born, it was a matrix of CCD's. Concurrently the CCD was found to respond to photoelectric and it could travel along the surface of the CCD making it linear. In short an analog form cold be transmitted linearly and thus measured digitally. This could then be translated into values that could represent photo values. The photoly functional CCD was to be famous.

So this year Smith and Boyle were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. That's all fine and good but we must not forget that we rarely accomplish things all by ourselves. It was in a 1905 paper by Albert Einstein that would eventually prove the photoelectric effect that Smith and Boyle would validate in their research. Crazy Al would later receive the recognition he deserved. In 1921 he received the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Albert Einstein

Overall the CCD has been a valuable device for the past 40 years. Photon collecting devices continued to evolve to the CMOS (Charged Metal Oxide Semiconductor) sensor we have today. Many Nikon cameras hold to the CCD over the CMOS at the a chagrin of their owners as they just love to eat up batteries. Great device but very hungry!

I',m about geeked out over this exiting topic but I just could not let this important milestone go unnoticed.

Take care... Doug

P.S. Yes I did not blog all of last week. No I was not in a funk, I was not without motivation (ok, just a little), it was just after missing Monday, I thought it would be nice to take the week off. Good thing as I was busy as a beaver around the house.