Steven J. Sasson

Steven Sasson, born on 4 July 1950, invented the digital camera, changing the future of photography and transforming an industry. Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, he was drawn to electronics and, after attending Brooklyn Technical High School, studied electrical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, earning a bachelor's degree in 1972 and a master's degree in 1973. In 1973 he took a position at a research laboratory of the Eastman Kodak Company. In 1974 his supervisor Gareth Lloyd asked him to investigate whether the recently created charge-coupled device could be used to produce an image sensor for a camera. In December 1975 he completed a device that combined a Super 8 movie camera lens, 16 nickel cadmium batteries, an analog to digital converter, a CCD imaging area array and several dozen digital and analog circuits. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2011.