A 24-year-old was given a “project to keep me from getting into trouble.” The result changed photography forever
The digital camera revolutionized the photography industry, but photography’s transformation from film to digital started with a 24-year-old engineer just two years out of college. Steve Sasson was just 24 in 1975 when he built a device that mixed several pieces of technology into an eight-pound device: The first-ever digital camera.
Sasson was an engineer working at Eastman Kodak’s Applied Research Department just two years out of college when he was given a task: see if there was anything Kodak could use the new charge-coupled device, or CCD for.
“Hardly anybody knew I was working on this, because it wasn’t that big of a project,” the now-retried engineer said in a 2015 interview. “It wasn’t a secret. It was just a project to keep me from getting into trouble doing something else, I guess.”
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Sasson will be sharing his development of the first all-electronic digital still camera in a free lecture open to the public on Tuesday, March 3 at Nott Memorial at Union College in Schenectady, New York.
(Image credit: Brett Jordan / Flickr)
At the time when Sasson was tasked with investigating the CCD, the technology was in its infancy. The CCD was invented in late 1969 by Willard Boyle and George Smith at Bell Labs as a form of semiconductor memory, with their colleague Michael Tompsett later exploring the tech’s capabilities in imaging.
The CCD converted light into electrical signals, but at the time when Sasson set out to see what it could do for a camera company, the signal dissipated quickly without any way to store an image. Digitization was in its infancy, but Sasson decided to try storing those signals into numeric code.
Each solution led to another challenge until Sasson was left with an eight-pound digital camera that used an assortment of pieces, including a lens from a Super 8 camera, a cassette tape to store the digital images, and 16 batteries.
The resulting image was a .01 megapixel black and white image, which the young Sasson presented to Kodak executives on a TV – as the prototype came before even the first personal computer, which arrived the following year.
While the technology eventually drastically shifted photography’s trajectory, Sasson’s creation wasn’t initially well-received. As Sasson explained it: “Print had been with us for over 100 years, no one was complaining about prints, they were very inexpensive, and so why would anyone want to look at their picture on a television set?”
Sasson would later go on to lead the efforts behind ten patents before retiring from Kodak after 35 years.
Sasson’s presentation on March 3 is open to the public, with additional details available from Union College.
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