Willard Boyle

Willard Sterling Boyle (1924 to 2011) was a Canadian applied physicist who worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories and is credited, with George E. Smith, with inventing the charge-coupled device in 1969. The device became the light-sensing heart of digital imaging: it let NASA receive clear pictures sent back from space and it powers many digital cameras today, and Smith recalled that once the first imaging devices existed they knew that chemical photography was dead. The pair shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention, with Boyle taking one half of the prize. Boyle was born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, studied at McGill University, and in 1962 helped build the first continuously operating ruby laser with Don Nelson. Two retired Bell Labs colleagues, Eugene Gordon and Mike Tompsett, dispute that the application of the device to photography was Boyle's invention.