Willard Boyle
In 1969, Boyle and George E. Smith invented the charge-coupled device (CCD). Before CCDs were used in cameras, all cameras used chemicals to capture photographic images. CCDs made electronic photography possible. Boyle and Smith jointly received the Franklin Institute's Stuart Ballantine Medal in 1973, the 1974 IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award, the 2006 Charles Stark Draper Prize, and the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the CCD. NASA used the CCD to send clear pictures to Earth back from space. CCD is also used in many digital cameras today. Smith said of their invention: "After making the first couple of imaging devices, we knew for certain that chemistry photography was dead."