"Well we've got a new device here. It's not a transistor, it's something different."
William Boyle, coinventor
Charge-coupled device (CCD) technology is the bedrock of digital cameras and video but it started out as a new form of memory. One day in 1969 William Boyle (b. 1924) and George Smith (b. 1930) were brainstorming at Bell Labs in New Jersey and decided to play around with merging two of the new technologies that were being worked on— semiconductor bubble memory and the video phone.
The pair worked on a new principle of handling small pockets of electrical charge on a silicon chip that was similar to the work being done on moving microscopic "bubbles" of magnetism around on various materials. They called their invention the charge-coupled device. It soon became clear that the small packets of charge on the CCD could be put there using the photoelectric effect, which meant that incoming photons could be "captured." By the end of 1969 Boyle and Smith were able to use their new device to take electronic images at Bell Labs.
Various companies began developing the CCD, and in 1974 the first commercial device was released by Fairchild Semiconductor, capable of taking an image that measured 100x 100 pixels. Today CCDs are widespread in astronomical telescopes, scanners, and bar-code readers, as well as robotic vision and, of course, in everyday digital cameras.
