George Elwood Smith
active c. 1930, White Plains, New York, USA
American physicist, co-inventor of the CCD sensor that underpins digital photography.
Smith worked at Bell Labs from 1959 to 1986. In 1969, during a discussion about semiconductor memory, he and Willard Boyle sketched the CCD in under a week. Realizing the charge-accumulating elements were also light-sensitive, they turned it into an image sensor — the technology that replaced film in the 21st century.
Nobel-winning work
The Boyle–Smith CCD (1969) moved image capture from chemical film to semiconductor electronics. Each pixel is a MOS capacitor storing charge proportional to incident light; clock pulses shift the charge serially to a readout circuit. The principle ran medical cameras, astronomy (including Hubble) and video for decades.
Workplaces: Bell Laboratories
United States