After arriving at Kodak, Mr. Sasson was given a seemingly unimportant task — to see whether there was any practical use for a charged coupled device (C.C.D.). His boss suggested that he try using the 100-by-100-pixel CCD to digitize an image.
Charge-coupled devices, the very first digital imaging sensors, were still a relatively new technology at the time. CCD had only been invented six years earlier, in 1969, by George Smith and Willard Boyle of Bell Labs. Early CCDs yielded low resolution still images, but were put to use in video cameras in 1970.
Sasson quickly ordered a couple of them and set out to evaluate the devices, which consisted of a sensor that took an incoming two-dimensional light pattern and converted it into an electrical signal. Mr. Sasson wanted to capture an image with it, but the C.C.D. couldn’t hold it because the electrical pulses quickly dissipated.
After working on his camera on and off for a year, Sasson decided on 12 December 1975 that he was ready to take his first picture. Lab technician Joy Marshall agreed to pose. The photo took about 23 seconds to record onto the audio tape.
To store the image, he decided to use what was at that time a relatively new process — digitalization — turning the electronic pulses into numbers. But that solution led to another challenge — storing it on RAM memory, then getting it onto digital magnetic tape.
The final result was a Rube Goldberg device with a lens scavenged from a used Super-8 movie camera; a portable digital cassette recorder; 16 nickel cadmium batteries; an analog/digital converter; and several dozen circuits — all wired together on half a dozen circuit boards.
The camera weighed eight pounds and took 23 seconds to make a photograph. It recorded 10,000-pixel (or 0.01 megapixel) black and white images on a cassette tape that could hold thirty pictures, which could then be played back as an image from the data stored on the tape.
Sasson and his supervisor, Garreth Lloyd, received U.S. Patent No. 4,131,919 for an electronic still camera in 1978.
Modern digital cameras evolved from a machine that was heavy, slow, and required an array of additional equipment to have an image displayed.
The first digital camera
