Merry Christmas from the team at Print Art

This tickled our fancy and though you might like to read about it too!
In 1975, a young engineer in the company that made Kodak film took the first picture on a handheld digital camera. 23-year-old Sasson joined Kodak in 1973. He wasn’t a research chemist who would work on new films, nor was he a mechanical engineer ready to design new cameras that would work with Kodak films. Instead, he was an electrical engineer, and something about the whole photographic process didn’t sit well with him. Sasson, now 75, says “When you first came to Kodak, you have to take photography lessons. You had to develop film. You had to go out and take pictures and study film and all that. And to be honest with you, I found it really annoying. I was raised on Star Trek, so I said what if we could just do it all electronically? What if I could store an image electronically, capture an image electronically, and I don’t require any film at all?” At this time rudimentary digital images were already being taken by Nasa satellites but they were not something that a person would be able to use to take their holiday snaps. Sasson believed the technology to make a film-less camera was already there, it just needed to be assembled into the right form. “I had no money to build this thing. Nobody told me to build it, and I certainly couldn’t demand any money for it,” he says. “I basically stole all the parts.” Along with his colleague Jim Schueckler, Sasson spent more than a year putting the increasingly bulky device together. By December 1975, the camera and its playback unit was complete. Sasson’s new camera was not a sleek, desirable object that might turn heads at a photo industry conference or in a camera shop. It looked like an oversized toaster. The camera had a shutter that would take an image at about 1/20th of a second, and – if everything worked as it should – the cassette tape would start to move as the camera transferred the stored information from its CCD. Sasson’s original camera now lives in the George Eastman Museum in Rochester. Its creator was given the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2009, the country’s highest award for scientists. The technology he helped bring into reality has now developed far beyond the dreams of any Star Trek-loving electrical engineer – the phones we carry in our pockets are capable of taking images almost impossible to capture on photographic film. Read all the nitty gritty about Sasson and his invention by clicking on the full BBC article below!