Digital cameras have become the norm, and it seems they've been with us forever, although in reality they are a fairly recent invention. This is the story of the first digital camera, a contraption that ran on 16 nickel-cadmium batteries and needed 23 seconds to take a photo only 100 pixels high.
Unless you're a photography enthusiast (and maybe a bit older), it's very possible that if you have a camera apart from the one on your mobile phone, it's digital. This type of device offers everything the average user needs when dealing with taking photographs: low prices, no need for film, no development costs, the number of shots you can take on each outing is practically unlimited, it takes good quality images, it's light, it almost completely lacks delicate mechanical parts, etc. In fact, there's a whole generation that practically doesn't know 'film' cameras.
We're used to small, thin, light cameras. Especially if the only one you use is the one on your mobile phone. However, the first models, and especially the first prototype of a 'digital camera' that was created, was not exactly a small, cheap, or light device.
The Invention of Steve Sasson
The hero of this story is a Kodak employee named Steve Sasson. A few years ago, Steve received a request from his supervisor Gareth A. Lloyd: could he build a camera using solid-state electronic components and a sensor known as "charge coupled device" (CCD), that would obtain optical information? That's how, in the mid-70s of the last century, Sasson began gathering the pieces needed to create what he had been asked for. It should be noted that in 1972, Texas Instruments had designed an electric camera, but although it didn't use film, it wasn't digital: it used only analog electronics.
In December 1975, after hundreds of hours of work, Steve had a prototype of his dream camera ready. Among the parts that brought this true technological Frankenstein to life were a lens 'recovered' from the pile of discarded parts from the Super 8 camera assembly line; a digital data cassette recorder; an analog/digital converter (Motorola brand) 'inherited' from a digital voltmeter; a fairly unstable CCD sensor that Fairchild Semiconductor had introduced to the market a couple of years earlier; a good handful of analog and digital integrated circuits spread across half a dozen printed circuit boards; and a pack of 16 nickel-cadmium batteries capable of delivering the current that all that jumble of parts required to function.
Steve had built the digital circuit from scratch, using an oscilloscope's measurements as a guide. The prototype weighed (without batteries) more than three and a half kilos, and was the size of a large toaster. Sasson convinced a lab assistant to pose in front of the camera, and took a black and white image with a resolution of 0.01 megapixels (the image contained fewer than 10,000 pixels in total), since the sensor was only capable of capturing images about 100 pixels high. Transferring the image from the camera's RAM memory to the cassette tape took about 23 seconds.
The first black and white digital camera had been born, with very low resolution, and it could only take a couple of photos per minute. Of course, the LCD screens we see today even on soup cans weren't available yet, so you had no way to see the images you had captured on the camera itself. To solve this problem, Sasson equipped his invention with a 'small' interface that allowed reading the cassettes recorded by the camera and displaying the images on a standard TV (under NTSC standard). This device interpolated the original 100 lines of the shots captured by the CCD to reach the 400 lines required by the NTSC standard.
When Sasson put the cassette with his assistant's image into the interface and turned on the TV, he had to wait another 23 seconds for the data to pass from the tape to the device's memory. It's possible they were the longest 23 seconds of his life. But he had finally done it: the girl's image was on the TV.
"You could see the silhouette of her hair", Sasson recalls. "But her face was just a blur of static. She was not happy with the photograph, and left, saying we should get back to work" he added. But he already had the solution. After touching some wires, the assistant's face appeared clearly on the television. In 1978, Sasson and Lloyd obtained US patent number 4,131,919 for their digital camera. The rest is known history.
It's possible that Sasson didn't realize the scope his invention would have. Indeed, the technology he had developed made the use of virgin films and, obviously, the subsequent chemical developing processes unnecessary. Kodak, the company he worked for, obtained most of its income from these supplies.
Today Steve Sasson is part of the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame, created in 2000. A well-deserved place for the person responsible for one of the most important inventions in consumer electronics. If you're interested in the history of photography, you shouldn't miss the article about the first photograph uploaded to the web and the one about the first photo sent from a mobile phone. Enjoy!
You can read more about Steve Sasson on Wikipedia.
