{"id":31637,"date":"2025-06-08T01:03:21","date_gmt":"2025-06-08T05:03:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/?p=31637"},"modified":"2025-06-08T22:54:25","modified_gmt":"2025-06-09T02:54:25","slug":"who-the-heck-was-geo-e-smith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/who-the-heck-was-geo-e-smith\/","title":{"rendered":"who the heck was Geo E Smith?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

George E Smith and the famous CCD created by him and Willard S Boyle in the early 1970s<\/p><\/div>\n

Toronto.<\/strong> We all know about the contributions of Daguerre, Fox Talbot, Scott Archer, Dick Maddox, and George Eastman to photography. Most were eccentric, sometimes well-to-do individuals whose ideas have become sign posts along the way in photographic history.<\/p>\n

By the time photography entered the digital era, development of technology had shifted to scientists working in institutions and commercial laboratories. For example, last century (c1947), the transistor was developed by a trio of scientists<\/a> at Bell Labs in New Jersey starting the digital revolution.<\/p>\n

About a decade later,Texas Instruments (and Fairchild Semiconductor) manufactured integrated circuits (ICs<\/a>), to save space and manufacturing steps. I still have a darkroom timer I built around a then popular IC by Signetics<\/a>, some switches, tantalum<\/a> condensers, and a few other bits and pieces.<\/p>\n

In the case of digital technology, Bell Labs scientists (again) came up with the basis for sensors – the means to create electronic files based on photons bounced off the subject. Dr George E Smith<\/a> and his associate, Dr Willard S Boyle, came up with the idea, of a charge couple device (CCD) as they called it, in 1969 and registered it 5 years later.<\/p>\n

So if you use a digital camera of any sort (and who doesn’t these days) the device works thanks to a sensor based on the Nobel prize winning idea of the CCD.<\/p>\n

My thanks to my good friend and fellow PHSC member, 90+ year old George Dunbar, who took the time to send me the NYT article on the late George E Smith.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Toronto. We all know about the contributions of Daguerre, Fox Talbot, Scott Archer, Dick Maddox, and George Eastman to photography. Most were eccentric, sometimes well-to-do individuals whose ideas have become sign posts along the way in photographic history. By the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1944],"tags":[3883,3881,105,3765,4751],"class_list":["post-31637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","tag-bell-labs","tag-ccd","tag-digital","tag-nobel","tag-scientist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31637"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31637\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31652,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31637\/revisions\/31652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/phsc.ca\/camera\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}