The Meeting of the Night Vision Camcorder With This Year's Nobel Prize

How are the Nobel Prize, digital camcorders and telescopes all alike? We discovered that this year when the co-inventors of the CCD won the Nobel Prize.

Over the past several years, winners of the Nobel Prize have usually been more known for research they have been doing in their fields. But was originally conceived to reward those whose focus was on invention as well as research. And this year's award to the two physicists who worked together to invent the CCD returns the prize to inventors once again.

CCD stands for charge-coupled device. This is the inside unit that digital cameras and camcorders use to collect and capture the light from a scene and record it internally in the camera. Willard S Boyle and George E. Smith worked at Bell Labs in 1969 where they developed the technology and worked to create an actual working model. After their first attempts, they had an operational working prototype approximately one year later. This discovery changed the world of image recording forever.

Since the time of their original work, it has totally revolutionized all the areas which depend on image capture.

In addition to quick adoption in cameras and camcorders, CCD technology was also quickly adapted to such items as telescopes and medical imaging devices. The CCD quickly went to space and is used in space probes, spy satellites and astronomical telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope. Ground based telescopes also quickly changed over to CCD's. Viewing film plates taken in long exposures by telescopes is a thing of the past. Now images are recorded on CCD's and viewed and processed on computers.

This amazing change in how we record images has been the change we are all most familiar with. Modern digital cameras and camcorders have quickly changed from film to using technology that is a direct descendant of the CCD. Digital photography has quickly replaced film with its ease of use and matching or better quality.

In addition, other uses such as night vision technology for night vision camcorders and night vision goggles all use advanced CCD sensors to collect and amplify the light. Uses such as this were not heard of a few decades ago.

Smith and Boyle's work in inventing the CCD has truly changed the world in a very short time. Their contribution to technology will be long remembered and applauded. If the granting of the Nobel Prize were to be graded by the actual number of human beings affected by the discovery, the invention of the CCD would have to rank near or at the top of the list.