George E. Smith, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing a revolutionary imaging device that has not only allowed scientists see the universe more clearly but has also made it possible for hundreds of millions of people to record every birthday and vacation for posterity, died on Wednesday at his home in Barnegat Township, N.J. He was 95.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Lauren Lanning.
It was while he was working at Bell Laboratories in 1969 that Dr. Smith and a colleague, Willard S. Boyle, came up with the idea for what is known as the charge-coupled device, or CCD — a technology that is an essential component of nearly every telescope, medical scanner, photocopier and digital camera in use today.
Their work helped build “the foundation to our modern information society,” Gunnar Oquist, the Nobel academy’s secretary general, said when it was announced that Dr. Smith and Dr. Boyle would share the 2009 prize for physics. (They split the award with Charles K. Kao, who was recognized for work that resulted in the development of fiber-optic cables.)
Dr. Smith and Dr. Boyle had been trying to create better memory storage for computers when the idea for the CCD arose. They thought the photoelectric effect — which Einstein had explained, an explanation that won him a 1921 Nobel Prize — might offer a solution.
The photoelectric phenomenon occurs when electromagnetic radiation, such as light, hits a metal surface, dislodging electrons from atoms and causing a current to flow through the metal. The device that Dr. Smith and Dr. Boyle created employs rows of tiny capacitors to store and transfer the electrical charge — essentially capturing light — and uses the information to construct an image.
It took them an hour, they later said, to come up with the concept and design. They wrote up the idea in a 1970 paper and filed a patent for it, which was registered in 1974.
One of the great advantages of the device is that it distinguishes, measures and records almost every photon of light, making it possible to take far more precise and detailed photographs, particularly of intergalactic bodies, than had been possible with film.
“The challenge when designing an image sensor was to gather and read out the signals in a large number of image points, or pixels, in a short time,” the Nobel committee said, adding that the two men’s invention had “transformed photography, as sight could now be captured electronically instead of on film.”
Dr. Smith and Dr. Boyle’s Nobel win was not without controversy.
Michael F. Tompsett and Eugene I. Gordon, scientists who also worked at Bell Laboratories, claimed that they should receive at least equal credit for developing the CCD, as they were the ones who had demonstrated its implications for imaging. Dr. Smith and Dr. Boyle, they said, had set out to create a memory circuit, not a digital imaging device.
A 1978 article in The New York Times would seem to back up that claim, at least in part, noting that Dr. Tompsett had patented technology that made it possible to build a video camera small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand. But that was four years after Dr. Smith and Dr. Boyle had patented their device, which is often credited with laying the groundwork for Dr. Tompsett’s research.
Shortly after being awarded the Nobel, Dr. Smith told The Chronicle Herald, a Canadian newspaper, that he had “documentation” that disproved Dr. Tompsett and Dr. Gordon’s claims, adding that “what they are saying is not at all logical.”
George Elwood Smith was born on May 10, 1930, in White Plains, N.Y., the eldest of four children of George and Lillian (Voorhies) Smith. His father, an insurance underwriter, was unhappy at work, and because of his job-hopping the family was constantly on the move.
In a 2001 interview with the Engineering and Technology History Wiki website, Dr. Smith said that he grew up in seven states and attended nine elementary schools and five high schools.
Following high school, he joined the Navy; he served for four years, partly during the Korean War, as an aerographer’s mate, or weatherman. He went on to study mathematics, first at the University of Miami and then at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1955. He married Janet Carson the same year.
He studied physics at the University of Chicago and received a Ph.D. in 1959, with a three-page dissertation on the electronic properties of semimetals. (At the time, it was the shortest Ph.D. dissertation in the history of the University of Chicago; still, it was accepted for publication in Physical Review, a prestigious scientific journal.)
After graduating, Dr. Smith accepted a job in the research division of Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where he remained until he retired in 1986.
Dr. Smith held 30 patents, including the one for the CCD, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. The invention of the CCD brought him many awards in addition to the Nobel, including the Stuart Ballantine Medal from the Franklin Institute and the Charles Stark Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering. He also helped found Electron Device Letters, a publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Dr. Smith was an avid sailor, a passion he shared with his wife; after he was hired by Bell Laboratories, they bought a 19-foot sailboat, which they used on weekends. Ms. Smith died in 1975, and two years later he began a relationship with Janet Murphy, a teacher who also loved sailing. Ms. Murphy died in 2020.
In addition to Ms. Lanning, Dr. Smith is survived by two other children, Leslie Collins and Carson Smith; five grandchildren; seven great-grandchildren; and two sisters, Laura Hordeski and Nancy Bell. His brother, Stephen, died in 2015.
When Dr. Smith retired, he and Ms. Murphy bought a 31-foot Southern Cross sailboat that they called Apogee and left their home in New Jersey to circumnavigate the world. Apart from a few short visits, they did not return to the United States until 2003.
During those 17 years, they crossed the Atlantic Ocean twice and sailed through the Panama Canal. They explored the Galápagos Islands for a month and then sailed to Tahiti and the Cook Islands. They spent seven years sailing around New Zealand, Australia, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, and then traveled to Indonesia, Thailand, across the Indian Ocean and through the Red and Mediterranean Seas.
As Dr. Smith told Soundings, an online sailing publication, in 2009, “I wanted to go sailing long before I got into physics.”
The post George E. Smith, Nobel Winner Who Created a Digital Eye, Dies at 95 appeared first on New York Times.
