A 'toaster with a lens': The story behind the first handheld digital camera
George Eastman MuseumIn 1975, a young engineer in the company that made Kodak film took the first picture on a handheld digital camera. Photography would never be the same again.
When Steve Sasson started working at Eastman Kodak, the American photographic film manufacturer was a vibrant symbol of American industrial ingenuity.
Set up by George Eastman in the 1870s, the company became synonymous with film photography thanks to their Kodak brand. People bought Kodak films and loaded them into Kodak-branded cameras. Their films were processed using Kodak development chemicals and they thumbed through the resulting prints on Kodak photographic paper.
The company had even come up with a snappy slogan at the end of the 19th Century about this nose-to-tail process: "You push the button, we do the rest."
But when a 23-year-old Sasson joined Kodak in 1973, he felt out of place. He wasn't a research chemist who would work on new films, nor was he a mechanical engineer ready to design new cameras that would work with Kodak films. Instead, he was an electrical engineer, and something about the whole photographic process didn't sit well with him.
Getty images"When you first came to Kodak, you have to take photography lessons," Sasson, now 75, says over a video call with the BBC from his home office in the US. "You had to develop film. You had to go out and take pictures and study film and all that. And to be honest with you, I found it really annoying. You take your picture, you have to wait a long time, you have to fiddle with these chemicals.
"Well, you know, I was raised on Star Trek, and all the good ideas come from Star Trek. So I said what if we could just do it all electronically? What if I could store an image electronically, capture an image electronically, and I don't require any film at all?"
The buildings blocks of a camera that didn't need film had already been taking shape, even if no-one had set out to invent one. For decades, scientists had known that when certain metals were bombarded with strong enough wavelengths of light, they would generate weak electrical currents. The first exposure meters – showing a photographer what settings to make on their camera for a correct exposure – used this principle with a cell made of selenium.
Rudimentary digital images were also already being taken by Nasa satellites such as Landsat using a kind of digital sensor based on vacuum tube technology. Astronomers were also using computers to turn light detection from large telescopes into images, but they were enormously expensive and bulky. They were not something that a person would be able to use to take their holiday snaps.
Researchers at Bell Labs in the US had, in 1969, created a type of integrated circuit called a charge-coupled device (CCD). An electric charge could be stored on a metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS), and could be passed from one MOS to another. Its creators believed one of its applications might one day be used as part of an imaging device – though they hadn't worked out how that might happen.
The CCD, nevertheless, was quickly developed. By 1974, the US microchip company Fairchild Semiconductors had built the first commercial CCD, measuring just 100 x 100 pixels – the tiny electronic samples taken of an original image. The new device's ability to capture an image was only theoretical – no-one had, as yet, tried to take an image and display it. (Nasa, it turned out, was also looking at this technology, but not for consumer cameras.)
"I wasn't aware of it until it was brought to my attention by my supervisor, Gareth Lloyd," Sasson says. In 1974, he was working then in Eastman Kodak's Applied Research Laboratory, a tinkerer's paradise. "We would do product ideas, solve problems. It wasn't futuristic research. Gareth came to me one day – I remember it because the conversation was less than a minute, I remember him leaning against my file cabinet – and he said, 'I've got two jobs for you, filler jobs until we have something really useful for you.'"
One of the jobs Sasson was given was to model some exposure controls for one of the company's consumer movie cameras. The other? Take a look at a new type of integrated circuit called the CCD.
Getty Images"I just loved the idea of how light could affect electronics and control them," Sasson says. "I did a master's thesis in that." He had even built a small device with a semiconductor that could be controlled by pulses of light.
Sasson believed the technology to make a film-less camera was already there, it just needed to be assembled into the right form. "The only thing I need is a few joules of energy to store a charge pattern, an optical pattern. And I thought that was just clean. I thought it was neat. I thought it was modern.
"I wanted to build a camera with no moving parts. Now that was just to annoy the mechanical engineers. Most cameras at the time were mechanical marvels, and I couldn't build a mechanical camera to save my life. So I thought, since these guys are the cream of the crop, I'll just make one with no moving parts, and that'll annoy the hell out of them."
Lloyd had told him to buy one of these new circuits. "I ended up buying two. I said, 'in case I blow one up', which I probably would have done."
When they arrived, Sasson set to work. "These were very, very strange devices. You had to supply about 12 different voltages to it. When the device comes there's a piece of paper folded on top of it that tells you the 12 voltages that this particular device worked on when it left the factory, and then on the bottom it said, 'Good luck.' If any one of these voltages was not right, you just didn't get an output, and it was up to you to figure out which one it was."
Sasson's investigations showed that the new circuit had promise, but also downfalls. "It was a great imaging device, but it was a terrible storage device. You if you had an image that was exposed on it for 100 milliseconds or so, you know, it would start to degrade right away." The problem was something called "dark current", a small electronic current generated from thermal heat that interfered with the circuit. It's a major generator of the interference we know now as "noise".
The CCD circuit responded to light but could only form an image if Sasson was somehow able to attach a lens to it. He could then convert the light into digital information – a blizzard of 1s and 0s – but there was just one problem: money.
"I had no money to build this thing. Nobody told me to build it, and I certainly couldn't demand any money for it," he says. "I basically stole all the parts, I was in Kodak and the apparatus division, which had a lot of parts. I stole the optical assembly from an XL movie camera downstairs in a used parts bin. I was just walking by, you see it, and you take it, you know." He was also able to source an analogue to digital converter from a $12 (about £5 in 1974) digital voltmeter, rather than spending hundreds on the part.
"I could manage to get all these parts without anybody really noticing," he says.
The camera started slowly taking shape. The bulky device needed a way to store the information the CCD was capturing, so Sasson used an audio cassette deck. But he also needed a way to view the image once it was saved on the magnetic tape.
Getty Images"We had to build a playback unit," Sasson says. "And, again, nobody asked me to do that either. So all I got to do is the reverse of what I did with the camera, and then I have to turn that digital pattern into an NTSC television signal." NTSC (National Television System Committee) was the conversion standard used by American TV sets.
Sasson had to turn only 100 lines of digital code captured by the camera into the 400 lines that would form a television signal. What he had to do was duplicate – or interpolate – them. But how? "The only thing that would do that would be a microprocessor. They were just coming out, and there was a microprocessor development system by Motorola that could address this much memory," he says.
The new microprocessor cost several thousand dollars – a small fortune at the time – and Sasson wrote a proposal asking for one so that he could research how it worked, rather than what he was intending to build with it. To his surprise, he got the go ahead. "I could build the memory cards, put them in, and have the processor work on it, to rearrange it, do all this interpolation that I needed to do."
Along with his colleague Jim Schueckler, Sasson spent more than a year putting the increasingly bulky device together. By December 1975, the camera and its playback unit was complete. The camera had a shutter that would take an image at about 1/20th of a second, and – if everything worked as it should – the cassette tape would start to move as the camera transferred the stored information from its CCD.
Getty ImagesSasson's new camera was not a sleek, desirable object that might turn heads at a photo industry conference or in a camera shop. It looked like an oversized toaster, a Heath-Robinson-esque device that had been cobbled together as the problems it needed to surmount became evident one by one. "Everything was built just once in the actual device. Everything was hand done," says Sasson.
The new camera was bulky and weighed 8lb (3.6kg), but it was still portable. Sasson folded it up and walked to a nearby office to try and take the first picture. In that office was a fellow researcher called Joy Marshall.
"I said, 'Can I take a picture of you?' And she knew we were the guys at the end of the hall, you know, the maniacs you didn't really talk to too much," Sasson says.
"I took a picture of her head and shoulders. And I knew the camera was working because the tape started to move – the image was captured in a 20th of a second, but that [saving to the tape] took 23 seconds.
"So I'm happy. I'm walking back to the lab… and we put it in the playback unit. It took about 23 seconds to play it back, and then about eight seconds to reconfigure it to make it look like a television signal, and send it to the TV set that I stole from another lab."
Slowly the picture that Sasson had taken on the first camera without film began to appear. "You could see her head, her hair, down to her shoulders. She had black hair. It was a sort of a light background. You could see the light background, but her face was completely distorted. You couldn't tell it was a person."
"We were so happy, because we knew 1,000 reasons why we might not see anything," says Sasson. "The fact that we could see that the picture was organised, the hair was in the right place, that's fantastic. We were just overjoyed.
"But Joy had followed me back because she was curious, you know, and she was standing in the hallway. We turned around, and Joy says: 'Needs work,' and turned out and walked away."
The way the machine had been configured meant anything that was not dark or light enough couldn't be rendered properly – which is why the light background and Marshall's hair were discernible but her face wasn't. Reversing some of the wires inside the circuitry – "it was easier to reverse wires than change software back then" – meant that Sasson and Schueckler suddenly "saw the picture".
The first image captured by a handheld digital camera – low resolution as it was, given the small number of pixels – had been taken. The world of photography had transformed in 1/20th of a second and 23 seconds of data transfer.
Getty ImagesThe camera that Sasson had cobbled together out of spare parts and hardware bought with petty cash changed the arc of his career overnight.
"I was just happy that thing worked and it wasn't until I started demonstrating this to different elements of Kodak management did I start to get into, you know, the ramifications of such a thing," he says. "I thought, 'Gee, if you can take pictures and look at them and don't require film and don't require paper, it all requires a few joules of energy, that's got to be cool, right?'"
Sasson was soon asked by his manager to demonstrate the camera management from some of the film giant's other department.
"Gareth would give me a list of people to invite. I'm a junior engineer, you know, and I'm inviting managers. And then those managers saw it, then they invited other managers. And I got some pretty important people in these rooms.
"I did the same thing each time. Whoever was sitting on the right side – I would take a head-and-shoulder shot of them. And then the tape would start to move – I'd feel better because it was working. I would explain to people what this thing was… and then when the tape stopped, I would take a picture of the first person sitting on the left side. The tape would start again. Previous to this, we had brought in the playback unit, and the monitor, on a cart and we put it in the back of the room, and Jim would go back there. I would pop out the tape and I would pass it to him and he would put it in there. He'd be talking and all of a sudden the picture would come up. And the minute that picture came up, I lost control of every meeting."
Eastman Kodak's managers, immersed in the business of selling film, the chemicals to develop it, and the cameras that shot it, suddenly saw a revolution that was being televised. Sasson was bombarded with questions. How long before this became a consumer camera? Could it shoot colour? How good could the quality be? These were not questions the electrical engineer had given any thought to. "I thought they'd asked me, 'How did you get such a small A to D [analogue to digital] converter to work?' Because that's what I wrestled with for over a year.
"They didn't ask me any of the 'how' questions. They asked me 'why'? 'Why would anybody want to take their pictures this way?' 'What's wrong with photography?' 'What's wrong with having prints?' 'What's an electronic photo album going to look like?' After every meeting, Gareth would come over to check that I was still alive."
Getty ImagesThe genie was out of the bottle and Sasson found himself trying to predict the future as if through a crystal ball. In his initial meetings with Eastman Kodak's consumer divisions after the first camera was created, he kept being asked when technology would become "normal" – all of this a decade before the idea of an affordable personal computer became mainstream.
"This was a completely digital device, from one end to the other. There were really no digital consumer products. What I had to do was to use analogies. The HP35 calculator had come out, and I said, 'Think of this as a calculator with a lens. It's doing computations. It's storing numbers. A lot more numbers than you store.'"
Sasson remembers an encounter with somebody from Eastman Kodak's consumer products division. He had used the calculator analogy and mentioned the do-it-yourself computer board kit that had started to be sold by an upstart company in California called Apple. 'It's funny how you can remember all these years later, I remember where he was sitting, sitting on the left side, third one up, and he said, 'How much for the calculator that you just told us about?' I said, 'That's about $400 (about £200).' 'And how much for the computer board from the California guys?' I said, 'About $700 (about £350) or so.'
"He says, 'So for $1100 (£550), you can take way worse pictures than a fully loaded Instamatic for $35 (£17.50). Why are we talking about this?' I didn't have an answer."
AlamyOne question never stopped being asked: when would this technology be viable? "I had to come up with an answer. So I called the research labs, and I said, 'How many pixels would I need in order to have equivalent film quality of 110 film', which was like the worst film format you could find." The lab said he would need a million pixels, or two million if the image was going to be in colour.
"I've got 10,000 black and white pixels," Sasson says. He turned to an observation called Moore's law, which said that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubled every two years as the technology matured. "Nobody was questioning Moore's law. This was completely digital. I had no idea if CCD technology would follow Moore's law. I doubted if it would, but, you know, I'm desperate. So I did a calculation, and I said, 'Between 15 and 20 years'." Kodak's first consumer digital camera, the DC40, came out in 1995 – 18 years after Sasson's prediction.
"Complete luck," he says. "I take no credit for that prediction. I was so desperate just to get a number out there that was based on something, you know. So if they wanted to challenge it, I'd say, 'Well, here's Moore's law. You go argue with Moore's law.'"
In 1978, Kodak was granted the first patent for a digital camera. It was Sasson's first invention. The patent is thought to have earned Eastman Kodak billions in licensing and infringement payments by the time they sold the rights to it, fearing bankruptcy, in 2012.
The road towards the first consumer digital cameras was paved by others within Eastman Kodak, including Bryce Bayer, the engineer who invented the Bayer array, a way of layering red-blue-green filters on digital sensors which transformed digital colour photography.
As for Sasson, he never worked on anything other than the digital technology he had helped to create until he retired from Eastman Kodak in 2009. "It was really cool being around all these really smart guys that were trying to think about how this stuff is going forward. But it was only the research guys, the technical guys, that were kind of excited about it. Most of the business guys were very hesitant. And I must admit, I was a really poor evangelist." At one point when asked by someone in the company what would happen to all the photo stores that sold Kodak cameras and films and prints, Sasson suggested they'd sell batteries instead. "That did not go over well."
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The received wisdom written over the past few decades is that Steve Sasson invented a revolutionary digital product for a resolutely analogue company, which preceded to stick its head in the sand and try to pretend that this electronic threat would eventually go away. That narrative is not true, says Todd Gustavson, the curator of technology at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. Instead, he says, Sasson had invented the digital camera too early for Eastman Kodak to capitalise on.
"It's really not a very fair statement to say that they missed the digital photography that they actually had invented," he says.
The spark that Sasson's invention needed came in the form of the growth of personal computing and the internet revolution that followed on its coattails. This still took nearly a decade before it was mainstream enough to allow digital photography to supplant film.
Courtesy of Steve Sasson"Part of what happens with a lot of this stuff is it's sort of like being too early to the party," says Gustavson. "Because of their [Eastman Kodak's] research labs and innovative nature, they tended to create things that, were ahead of the curve, not behind it."
Sasson's original camera now lives in the George Eastman Museum in Rochester. Its creator was given the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2009, the country's highest award for scientists. The technology he helped bring into reality has developed far beyond the dreams of any Star Trek-loving electrical engineer – the phones we carry in our pockets are capable of taking images almost impossible to capture on photographic film, Gustavson points out.
As for the Sasson, the moment where he realised his invention was poised to go mainstream was on a holiday with his wife Cindy and children in 1998 at Yellowstone National Park. Sasson wasn't married when he built the digital camera and rarely mentioned it outside of work. They were sitting in the stands near the Old Faithful geyser, waiting for the moment it would blow.
"I saw people getting ready to take this picture. They got their cameras ready. And I saw they had film cameras, they had video cameras, they had digital cameras, I remember saying to Cindy, looking around at this, waiting, I said, 'It's happening.' She said, 'What?' I explained to her how I built this first prototype camera many, many years ago, and that how I had to explain how this might evolve, and what my dream was.
"Now I'm on vacation in Yellowstone in my real life, you know, with my wife and my kids. And it just hits you – this is what I was thinking about. And I'm still alive. I could see it."
* Stephen Dowling is BBC Future's deputy editor. He writes about photography on the blog Kosmo Foto.
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