Overview
Michael Tompsett (born 1939) built the first CCD imaging sensors and the first solid-state video camera at Bell Labs in the early 1970s, and holds the patent for the CCD imaging application. He took the first CCD photograph — of his wife Margaret, which appeared on the cover of Electronics in 1973. He argued publicly that the 2009 Nobel citation described his work.
What You Need
- Born 1939, Britain, worked in the United States
- Anchor year: 1971 — the first CCD imaging sensors
- Strand: overlooked — and he said so himself
Steps
The problem as it stood
Boyle and Smith had conceived charge transfer as a memory structure. Turning that into a working imager meant designing photosensitive arrays, solving charge transfer efficiency, handling blooming and dark current, and building the surrounding camera electronics.
What he actually did
Tompsett designed and built imaging CCDs and the camera around them, filed the patent for the imaging application, and demonstrated a working solid-state video camera — the first of a lineage that eventually replaced camera tubes entirely.
How it worked
An imaging CCD needs transfer efficiency near perfection: a packet passing through hundreds of transfers loses a little at each, and the losses compound into smearing. It also needs anti-blooming so a bright highlight does not spill charge into neighbours. These are the problems that separate a laboratory structure from a camera.
What it made possible
Solid-state cameras: broadcast, consumer camcorders, and eventually every digital camera. It also ended the era of camera tubes that ran from Zworykin's iconoscope through the image orthicon and vidicon.
What happened to him
He later worked on thermal imaging and founded companies in that field. He publicly criticised the 2009 Nobel award, arguing that the citation described the imaging application that was his contribution.
Where the credit landed
Tompsett is one of very few figures in this corpus who contested his own omission publicly and in his own lifetime. He does not dispute that Boyle and Smith conceived charge transfer; he disputes that they made it an imager. Since the Nobel citation concerned imaging, the objection is specific and substantive rather than a general grievance, and it remains unresolved.
Pro Tips
- Transfer efficiency must be near perfect — losses compound over hundreds of transfers.
- He took the first CCD photograph, of his wife Margaret, in 1973.
- He contested the Nobel citation publicly, on specific grounds.
Knowledge Base
What You'll Learn
Conceiving a structure and making it a camera are different achievements.
Why transfer efficiency is the hard part
Charge is moved from well to well hundreds of times before it reaches the output. If each transfer is 99.9% efficient, after 500 transfers only about 61% of the original packet survives — and the lost fraction trails behind, smearing the image. Practical imaging CCDs need efficiencies of 99.999% or better. That requirement, not the concept, is what took years of device engineering.
Where This Fits
This guide covers one specific part of the history of media technology. The wider picture — how each link in the chain from capture through transmission to display was actually built, who built it, and why the credit so often landed somewhere else — is in A History of Broadcast Technology: The Chain From Capture to Screen, which frames the discipline as a whole and links out to the detailed guides underneath it, including this one. If you are starting from scratch rather than solving a specific problem, read that first and come back here.
FAQ
Q: Who built the first CCD camera?
A: Michael Tompsett at Bell Labs, in the early 1970s. He designed the first CCD imaging sensors, holds the patent on the imaging application, and took the first CCD photograph in 1973.
Q: Why did he object to the Nobel Prize?
A: Because the 2009 citation described imaging, which he argues was his contribution, while the award went to Boyle and Smith who conceived the charge-transfer structure as a memory device.