Tutorials Video

Michael Tompsett: The First Solid-State Video Camera

By Infinite Creation · Profile

1939-

No freely licensed image known

At a Glance

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.

Born 1939, Britain, worked in the United States
Anchor year: 1971, the first CCD imaging sensors
Strand: overlooked, and he said so himself

Career

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.

Known For

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

The CCD camera made the capture link solid-state, the start of the chain followed in A History of Broadcast Technology.

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.

Vocabulary

CCD. A charge-coupled device, an image sensor that collects charge in each cell and shifts it along the chip to be read out. The first practical solid-state alternative to a camera tube.

Charge transfer. Moving accumulated charge from one cell to the next in sequence, like a bucket chain, until it reaches the output. Efficiency matters because losses accumulate over hundreds of transfers.

Solid-state sensor. An imaging device with no vacuum tube and no moving parts. Smaller, more durable and more stable than the tubes it replaced, and manufacturable by semiconductor processes.

Pixel. One picture element, the smallest area a sensor measures independently. The number of them sets resolution, and their physical size largely sets sensitivity and noise, which is why a large sensor outperforms a crowded small one.

Sources

The imaging patent was checked against the record, which matters here because the Nobel went elsewhere. Checked 20 August 2026.

US Patent 4,085,456, Charge Transfer Imaging Devices. Filed 30 August 1972 and granted 18 April 1978, assigned to Bell Telephone Laboratories and naming Michael Francis Tompsett as sole inventor. It describes imaging devices with separate sensing and storage arrays to prevent smearing during readout.