FOR MUCH OF the 20th century, the world's premier industrial research facility was Bell Labs, research wing of the giant AT&T telephone corporation, in Murray Hill, New Jersey. From it came many key technologies which define the contemporary world. All of modern electronics, for example, stems from the invention of the transistor by three Bell scientists, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley.Bell scientists also were responsible for the laser, many of the technologies used in radio astronomy and mobile phones, wireless local area networking, information theory, the Unix operating system and the C programming language. Seven Nobel prizes have been awarded for work done at Murray Hill.The latest of these (for physics) was presented in Oslo last week to Willard Boyle and George Smith, who on 17 October 1969 were trying to come up with an idea that would stop their boss's boss switching resources from their work to another department working on sexy new kinds of computer memory. In a discussion that lasted "not more than an hour" (as Smith later recalled) they came up with a device that changed the way we see the world. They called it a charge-coupled device or CCD, and it developed into the sensor at the heart of most digital cameras in use today.
FOR MUCH OF the 20th century, the world's premier industrial research facility was Bell Labs, research wing of the giant AT&T telephone corporation, in Murray Hill, New Jersey. From it came many key technologies which define the contemporary world. All of modern electronics, for example, stems from the invention of the transistor by three Bell scientists, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley.
Bell scientists also were responsible for the laser, many of the technologies used in radio astronomy and mobile phones, wireless local area networking, information theory, the Unix operating system and the C programming language. Seven Nobel prizes have been awarded for work done at Murray Hill.
The latest of these (for physics) was presented in Oslo last week to Willard Boyle and George Smith, who on 17 October 1969 were trying to come up with an idea that would stop their boss's boss switching resources from their work to another department working on sexy new kinds of computer memory. In a discussion that lasted "not more than an hour" (as Smith later recalled) they came up with a device that changed the way we see the world. They called it a charge-coupled device or CCD, and it developed into the sensor at the heart of most digital cameras in use today.
So who deserves the accolades for inventing the charge-coupled device? "It depends on what you're celebrating," says Carlo Sequin, who joined the team at Bell Labs developing the CCD a few months after the project began. "My initial assumption was the Nobel in physics goes to fundamental concepts," says Sequin, now a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. "If the fundamental concept was the charge transfer principle, then that goes to [Willard] Boyle and [George] Smith, and maybe Gene Gordon." But while Boyle and Smith, who were initially trying to design something analogous to magnetic bubble memory for computers in silicon, sketched out the charge transfer concept, they were not the ones who actually built the CCD, Sequin says. "If we try to find out who made the first practical image sensor, credit would go to Mike Tompsett, possibly [Gilbert] Amelio," he says.
"My initial assumption was the Nobel in physics goes to fundamental concepts," says Sequin, now a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. "If the fundamental concept was the charge transfer principle, then that goes to [Willard] Boyle and [George] Smith, and maybe Gene Gordon."
But while Boyle and Smith, who were initially trying to design something analogous to magnetic bubble memory for computers in silicon, sketched out the charge transfer concept, they were not the ones who actually built the CCD, Sequin says.
"If we try to find out who made the first practical image sensor, credit would go to Mike Tompsett, possibly [Gilbert] Amelio," he says.
