{"id":9212,"date":"2015-08-16T15:45:05","date_gmt":"2015-08-16T15:45:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/?p=9212"},"modified":"2015-08-16T15:45:05","modified_gmt":"2015-08-16T15:45:05","slug":"steven-sasson-invented-the-digital-camera-then-kodak-promptly-ignored-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/2015\/08\/steven-sasson-invented-the-digital-camera-then-kodak-promptly-ignored-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Steven Sasson invented the digital camera, then Kodak promptly ignored it"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In 1975, Kodak asked one of its?younger employees to play around with charged coupled devices to see what he could make. Turns out <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brw.com.au\/p\/tech-gadgets\/made_this_kodak_employee_invented_QnYp4iCrFXYwagdCRzszeP\">Steven Sasson invented the first digital camera<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>He quickly ordered a couple of them and set out to evaluate the devices, which consisted of a sensor that took an incoming two dimensional light pattern and converted it into an electrical signal. Mr. Sasson wanted to capture an image with it, but the C.C.D. couldn?t hold it because the electrical pulses quickly dissipated.<\/p>\n<p>To store the image, he decided to use what was at that time a relatively new process ? digitalization ? turning the electronic pulses into numbers. But that solution led to another challenge ? storing it on RAM memory, then getting it onto digital magnetic tape.<\/p>\n<p>The final result was a Rube Goldberg device with a lens scavenged from a used Super-8 movie camera; a portable digital cassette recorder; 16 nickel cadmium batteries; an analog\/digital converter; and several dozen circuits ? all wired together on half a dozen circuit boards.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>At which point Kodak patented it, and then forgot about it because it was more profitable selling camera films and one shot flash cubes than think about what digital would do to the business.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 1975, Kodak asked one of its?younger employees to play around with charged coupled devices to see what he could make. Turns out Steven Sasson invented the first digital camera: He quickly ordered a couple of them and set out to evaluate the devices, which consisted of a sensor that took an incoming two dimensional light pattern and converted it into an electrical signal. Mr. Sasson wanted to capture an image with it, but the C.C.D. couldn?t hold it because the electrical pulses quickly dissipated. To store the image, he decided to use what was at that time a relatively<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[25],"tags":[5423,1992,5422,4490],"class_list":["post-9212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-link-log","tag-digital-camera","tag-hack","tag-invention","tag-kodak","comments-off"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p58Gl0-2oA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9212"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9213,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9212\/revisions\/9213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ewanspence.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}