George E. Smith
In 1969, Boyle and George E. Smith invented the charge-coupled device (CCD), for which they have 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. The CCD allowed NASA to send clear pictures to Earth back from space. It is also the technology that powers 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." Eugene Gordon and Mike Tompsett, two now-retired colleagues from Bell labs, claim that its application to photography was not invented by Boyle. Boyle was Executive Director of Research for Bell Labs from 1975 until his retirement in 1979.