Born in White Plains, New York, Smith served in the U.S. Navy, then earned his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955, and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1959. His dissertation was apparently well argued: it only spanned eight pages. After school he was snapped up by Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., and worked there his entire career. He led research into novel lasers and semiconductor devices, and was awarded dozens of patents. He eventually rose to head the department developing very-large-scale integrated devices — I.C. chips that eventually grew to include millions, then billions, of tiny transistors, leading to a massive revolution in electronics. Yet that’s not what Smith is best known for.
On October 17, 1969, Smith was recruited by a more senior member of Bell Labs’ staff, Willard Boyle (Honorary Unsubscribe, Volume 5), to work on an important project for NASA: how to send clear pictures back from space. The two men brainstormed ideas, and came up with a simple integrated circuit that could digitize light using the photoelectric effect — which concept had won Albert Einstein a Nobel Prize in 1921. In “not more than an hour,” Smith said later, what he and Boyle came up with was the Charge-Coupled Device, or CCD, which is still the basis for digital imaging today, and used not only in still and video cameras (up to and including the Hubble Space Telescope), but “scopes” that surgeons use, barcode scanners, cellphone cameras, and more.
“A young person in the middle of a civil demonstration in Syria can instantly show the rest of the world from his cellphone camera, and it’s because of what Dr. Boyle did with his colleague George Smith at Bell Labs,” said H. Frederick Dylla, executive director of the American Institute of Physics, upon Boyle’s death. “This little chip makes those pictures possible.” Boyle and Smith understood it immediately: “After making the first couple of imaging devices, we knew for certain that chemistry photography was dead,” Smith said later.
Boyle and Smith shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics for their work. They also shared the Franklin Institute’s Stuart Ballantine Medal in 1973, the IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award in 1974, and the Charles Stark Draper Prize in 2006. In 2015, Smith was awarded the Progress Medal and Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society, and In 2017, Smith was announced as one of four winners of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, for his contribution to the creation of digital imaging sensors. Boyle died in 2011. George Elwood Smith died at his home in New Jersey on May 28, eight days after he turned 95.