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THIS WEEK'S HONORARY UNSUBSCRIBE goes to Willard Boyle. A native of Nova
Scotia, Canada, Boyle was a physicist who joined New Jersey's Bell Labs
in 1953. There, he helped perfect the ruby laser, developing (in 1962,
with Don Nelson) the first one that could operate continuously. The
same year he was named director of Space Science and Exploratory
Studies at Bellcomm, a Bell Labs subsidiary in Washington D.C., to
support the Apollo moon missions. Perhaps it was there that he started
thinking about a problem NASA had: sending clear pictures back from
space. On October 17, 1969, Boyle summoned a follow researcher, George
E. Smith, to his office to brainstorm a new idea: a simple electronic
chip that could digitize light using the photoelectric effect -- which
concept had won Albert Einstein a Nobel Prize in 1921. In "not more
than an hour," Smith said later, what he and Boyle came up with was the
Charge-Coupled Device, or CCD, which is still the basis for digital
imaging today, and used not only in still and video cameras (up to and
including the Hubble Space Telescope), but "scopes" that surgeons use,
barcode scanners, fax machines, and more. "A young person in the middle
of a civil demonstration in Syria can instantly show the rest of the
world from his cellphone camera, and it's because of what Dr. Boyle did
with his colleague George Smith at Bell Labs," said H. Frederick Dylla,
executive director of the American Institute of Physics. "This little
chip makes those pictures possible." Boyle and Smith understood it
immediately: "After making the first couple of imaging devices, we knew
for certain that chemistry photography was dead," Smith said later.
Boyle and Smith shared the Nobel Prize in physics for their work. Boyle
retired back to Nova Scotia in 1979, and died on May 7. He was 86.
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