George E. Smith

George E. Smith was an American applied physicist who, working at Bell Labs, co-invented the charge-coupled device, or CCD, in 1969 together with Willard Boyle. The CCD is a light-sensitive semiconductor circuit that converts incoming photons into an electronic signal, and it became the foundational imaging sensor behind digital still cameras, camcorders, image scanners and countless scientific and medical imaging instruments, effectively replacing photographic film and video camera tubes across much of photography and television production. For this invention, Smith and Boyle shared half of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics, with the other half awarded to Charles Kao for work on fiber optics. Smith also received the Charles Stark Draper Prize in 2006 and the Stuart Ballantine Medal in 1973 for the same body of work. Born in 1930, he spent most of his career at Bell Laboratories; he died in 2025.