The inventor of the first Digital Camera

Above is a picture of the first digital camera and the person who invented it.

Steven J. Sasson, the person who created the first digital camera is an American electrical engineer (born July 4, 1950 in Brooklyn, New York).

In 1974, Sasson began working with a very broad assignment from his supervisor at Eastman Kodak Company, Gareth A. Lloyd. He was asked to investigate the imaging properties of charge-coupled devices to create an image sensor for a film-free camera.

Lloyd posed this question to Sasson: Could a camera be built using solid state electronics, solid state imagers, and electronic sensor known as a charge coupled device (CCD) and then gather optical information?

So he set about constructing the digital circuitry from scratch, using oscilloscope measurements as a guide.

There were no images to look at until the entire prototype — an 8-pound (3.6-kilogram), toaster-size contraption — was assembled.

In December 1975, Sasson and his chief technician produced the first black-and-white digital image, captured at a resolution of .01 megapixels (10,000 pixels), took 23 seconds to record onto a digital cassette tape and another 23 seconds to read off a playback unit onto a television.

Then the picture popped up on the screen.

And the rest as they say, is history...!

In 1978, Sasson and Lloyd were issued U.S. Patent 4,131,919 for their digital camera.

Sasson now works to protect the intellectual capital of his employer, Eastman Kodak Company.

On November 17, 2010, US President Barack Obama awarded Sasson the National Medal of Technology and Innovation at the White House. This is the highest honor awarded by the US government to scientists, engineers, and inventors.

The video below has more info on the workings of first digital camera:

Inventor Portrait: Steven Sasson from David Friedman on Vimeo.