Willard Boyle

Willard Boyle: The Man Who Ended Film

A boy homeschooled by his mother in rural Quebec until he was fourteen grew up to pick the landing sites for Apollo, help build the first continuously operating ruby laser, and then, in 1969, co-invent the device that converts light into countable packets of electric charge. The charge-coupled device let NASA send sharp pictures home from space and put a sensor inside every digital camera on Earth. The Nobel committee took forty years to call.

Homeschooled in Quebec

Willard Sterling Boyle was born on 19 August 1924 in Amherst, Nova Scotia, and moved to Quebec at about the age of two. His mother taught him at home until he was fourteen, when he entered Lower Canada College in Montreal and encountered formal schooling for the first time.

He went on to McGill University, but the Second World War interrupted him in 1943. Boyle joined the Royal Canadian Navy and was loaned to the Royal Canadian Naval Air Service. In 1946 he married Betty, a landscape artist; they had four children, and eventually ten grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

He returned to McGill and did not stop: BSc in 1947, MSc in 1948, and a PhD in 1950 with a thesis on mass spectrometry — three degrees in four years.

Into Industry

Boyle spent a year at Canada's Radiation Lab, then two years teaching physics at the Royal Military College of Canada. In 1953 he joined Bell Telephone Laboratories, the industrial research organisation that in that era was producing more consequential physics than most universities.

Lasers and the Moon

The 1960s made him twice over. In 1962, with Don Nelson, Boyle built the first continuously operating ruby laser — lasers to that point had fired in pulses, and continuous operation is what turned the laser from a demonstration into an instrument. The same year his name went on the first patent for a semiconductor injection laser, the ancestor of the diode lasers in every optical drive and fibre link since.

Then he changed careers entirely. Boyle became director of Space Science and Exploratory Studies at Bellcomm, the Bell subsidiary supporting the Apollo programme, where his group's work included the selection of lunar landing sites. For a few years the man who would later invent digital imaging was deciding where humans would first set foot on another world.

In 1964 he went back to Bell Labs to work on integrated circuits.

The CCD

In 1969 Boyle and George E. Smith invented the charge-coupled device.

The principle is deceptively plain. Light striking a semiconductor liberates electrons; the CCD traps those electrons in an array of potential wells, one per picture element, then shifts the accumulated charge packet by packet along the chip to be read out and counted. The result is an image expressed as numbers — no film, no chemistry, no darkroom, and a sensitivity far beyond what emulsion could achieve.

The consequences were not incremental. NASA could transmit clear imagery from space back to Earth. Astronomers could detect objects too faint for photographic plates and could measure brightness quantitatively rather than by eye. Then the technology descended from observatories to consumers, and the CCD became the sensor in essentially every digital camera, camcorder and scanner — the physical reason photography stopped being an industry based on silver halide.

The invention did not go uncontested. Eugene Gordon and Mike Tompsett, both retired Bell Labs colleagues, argued publicly that the photographic application of the CCD was not Boyle's invention.

Recognition

Boyle served as Executive Director of Research at Bell Labs from 1975 to 1979. The honours accumulated slowly and then all at once: the Stuart Ballantine Medal in 1973, the IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award in 1974, the C&C Prize in 1999, the Edwin H. Land Medal in 2001, and the Charles Stark Draper Prize — engineering's highest — in 2006.

In 2009 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with George E. Smith and Charles K. Kao, whose fibre-optic work had transformed communication as the CCD had transformed imaging. Boyle was eighty-five. His own country made him an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2010.

Nova Scotia

In retirement Boyle and Betty returned to Nova Scotia and helped launch an art gallery in Wallace — an appropriate final act for a man whose life's work was the making of pictures. He died on 7 May 2011, aged eighty-six, at a hospital in Truro, Nova Scotia, from complications of kidney disease.

Why Boyle Matters

Most inventions improve on something. The CCD abolished something. Photography had been a chemical process for well over a century; Boyle and Smith made it an electronic one, and in doing so handed astronomy, medicine, space exploration and eventually every person with a telephone the ability to capture light as data.

It is worth noticing how the career was shaped. Boyle worked in a corporate laboratory, on lasers, on spacecraft, on integrated circuits, and only then on imaging — the CCD came from a physicist who had been moved around enough to see connections nobody specialising in cameras would have seen. Every photograph taken today is a descendant of that afternoon's work.