The Meeting Of The Night Vision Video Camera With This Year's Nobel Prize

How are the Nobel Prize, a night vision camcorder and telescopes all alike? We found out this year when the two inventors of the CCD won the Nobel Prize.

Over the past several years, those who were awarded the Nobel Prize have generally been more known for research they have been doing research in their fields. But the Nobel Prize originally was set up to reward those whose focus was on invention as well as research. And this year's award to the two physicists who created the CCD returns the prize to inventors once again.

CCD stands for charge-coupled device. This is the internal device that digital cameras and camcorders use to gather the light from a scene and store it inside in the camera. George E. Smith and Willard S Boyle collaborated at Bell Labs in 1969 where they developed the technology and made their efforts to incorporate it into an actual working model. After their first attempts, they had a working video camera approximately one year later. This discovery changed the world of image recording forever.

Since the time of their original work, it has totally revolutionized all the areas which depend on image capture.

In addition to quick adoption in cameras and camcorders, CCD technology was also quickly adapted to such items as telescopes and medical imaging devices. The CCD quickly went to space and is used in space probes, spy satellites and astronomical telescopes such as the Hubble Space Telescope. Ground based telescopes also quickly converted to CCDs. The old procedures of using film in telescopes is a thing of the past. Now images are recorded on CCD's and viewed and processed on computers.

The tremendous change in how we record images has been the change we are all most familiar with. Modern digital cameras and camcorders have quickly changed from film to using technology that is a direct descendant of the CCD. Digital photography has quickly replaced film with it's ease of use and matching or better quality.

In addition, other uses such as night vision technology for camcorders with night vision and the night vision video cameras all use the Nobel prize winner's technology to collect and amplify the light. These types of applications were not even available a few decades ago.

The work of Boyle and Smith in inventing the CCD has totally changed the world landscape of recording images. Their contribution to technology will be long remembered and applauded. If the granting of the Nobel Prize were to be graded by the actual number of human beings affected by the discovery, the invention of the CCD would have to rank near or at the top of the list.