Waretown Man wins Nobel Prize in Physics

While reading October 8^th’s Beacon I was surprised by a story about a Waretown resident that won the Noble Prize for physics. Not so much that the man, George Smith had won, but what he had won for and the date of the invention. Mr. Smith and a former colleague of his invented the CCD, or Charged Coupled Device, which is what makes digital photography possible. This is something I hear about in my household all the time since I have been married to a professional news photographer for the past 26 years. He is always cleaning the CCD in his cameras, and complaining about the particles he cannot remove from the CCD. I had thought this was an invention that had come about in the past 1o years, since my husband’s newspaper had only made the transformation to digital about 10 years ago. As it turns out the digital photograph has been around for quite sometime, it’s just the quality of the final product that has evolved, according to my husband.