Think what you will regarding Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace prize, but in my book the real highlight of this year’s round awards was honouring Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith with the Nobel Prize for Physics, given for thier invention of the CCD camera sensor.

For the non-technical, the CCD sensor is essentially what replaced film inside the camera to be able to make a direct digital recording of the image the camera captured.

Invented 40 years ago, it only came into general use over the last 10-15 years, being the heart of any digital camera. Now being slowly replaced with CMOS sensors (which offer vast improvements on image noise and power consumption), it was still THE fundamental stepping stone towards getting digital image recording to market.

Interesting footnote: While it may have taken 20 odd years to get to general use, the basic technical concept was devised in about.. 1 hour. Threated by employer Bell Labs with a funding cut, Boyle and Smith sketched out the idea on a blackboard in that fateful 60 minutes, devising a solid enough concept that they were both saved from funding cuts as well as being set up to work on the idea fully.

Check out this Wired.com article for more.