Inventing the Digital Camera: A Short Portrait of Steven Sasson

Work­ing for East­man Kodak back in 1975, Steven Sas­son, an elec­tri­cal engi­neer by train­ing, was tasked with build­ing a cam­era that used sol­id state elec­tron­ics and sol­id state imagers to cap­ture opti­cal infor­ma­tion. Or, put very sim­ply, he was asked to build the first dig­i­tal cam­era. And he did just that.

In the lat­est of a series of short doc­u­men­taries on con­tem­po­rary inven­tors, pho­tog­ra­ph­er David Fried­man sat down with Sas­son at Kodak’s head­quar­ters in Rochester, NY and revis­it­ed the tech­ni­cal and cul­tur­al chal­lenges faced by the inven­tor. So far, Fried­man has pro­duced 32 por­traits of inven­tors, and, for the most part, you’ll rec­og­nize the inven­tors’ cre­ations soon­er than their names. You can access the full col­lec­tion of por­traits here.

via Fast Co Design and Brain­Pick­ings