The camera on your phone is probably dozens of megapixels. Now cut that down to 0.01 megapixels, remove the color, scale the machine up to the size of a toaster and wait 23 seconds for every frame. That is exactly what the world's first handheld digital camera was.
Even more surprising, the company that built it was Kodak, the king of photographic film.
In a lab, December 1975
Steven Sasson was a young electrical engineer at Kodak. The task he was given was a rather general question: what could be done with a new image sensor called the CCD? The CCD had been invented in 1969 at Bell Laboratories by Willard Boyle and George E. Smith.
Using Fairchild's 100 x 100 pixel MV-101 sensor, Sasson built a portable, battery-powered machine. According to IEEE's historical records, the machine was completed in December 1975. It weighed about 8 pounds, that is, 3.6 kilograms.
The resolution was 10,000 pixels, that is, 0.01 megapixels. The images were black and white and were recorded onto a digital cassette tape.
23 seconds per frame, a TV to view it
After pressing the shutter, it took about 23 seconds for the image to be written to the tape. To see the photo you had to put the cassette into a separate playback unit and transfer the image to a television. That also took about 23 seconds.
In an interview with NBC News, Sasson describes how they made the first attempt with a photo of a lab assistant. Her hair showed up on screen, but her face was blurred with noise. Sasson noticed he had connected a group of wires backwards and fixed it. He adds that the model wasn't very happy with the result. Chief technician Jim Schueckler was beside him for this first shot.
Think about what 10,000 pixels means: even a small app icon on your screen today probably contains more pixels than that. But resolution wasn't the point. The point was that for the first time an image could be turned into numbers and stored, instead of being put on film.
| Then (1975) | Now |
|---|---|
| 0.01 megapixels | Dozens of megapixels in phones |
| Black and white | Color, HDR |
| Recording to tape, 23 seconds | Instant recording |
| A television to view it | The camera's own screen |
| 3.6 kg | A phone carried in a pocket |
Why did Kodak shelve it?
Let's first recall the context: in the 1970s photography meant film. People loaded film into the camera, handed it in for development when they were done, and held the prints days later. A significant part of Kodak's revenue also came from this cycle, from film and prints. The idea of a photo viewed on a screen and never printed on paper was completely foreign to this world.
Sasson showed the machine to Kodak executives in 1976. In the PetaPixel interview quoted by Snopes, Sasson says the executives asked him "why would anyone want to take pictures this way". The company patented the technology but didn't turn the machine into a product.
It's only fair to say something here. By Sasson's own estimate, digital needed 15 to 20 years to compete with film, and the prototype needed a television to show the image. So the decision wasn't entirely blindness. But the story has another side: Snopes touches on reports saying Sasson was told the machine could be sold but wouldn't be, because it would eat into film sales. Kodak, meanwhile, didn't stop working on digital imaging altogether, and in 1991 released a professional digital camera system.
The sad end of the story
Founded by George Eastman in 1888, Kodak was almost synonymous with photography itself for more than a century. But as the film world moved quickly to digital, Kodak couldn't keep up with the change. According to CNN, the company's sales nearly halved between 2005 and 2010. On January 19, 2012, Eastman Kodak filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the US bankruptcy code. According to CNN, the filing listed $6.75 billion in debt and $5.1 billion in assets.
Sasson received his due from elsewhere: on November 17, 2009, then US President Barack Obama awarded him the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. A company that didn't bring its own invention to market struggling in the world that invention created became one of the most frequently told lessons in tech history.
Even if Sasson's prototype looks like a museum piece today, every camera in our pockets rests on the question he answered: writing light to numbers, not to film.
Which company today, do you think, is keeping the future it holds in a drawer to protect its own old product?