'Father' of the digital camera dies

WALLACE, Nova Scotia, May 19 (UPI) -- Willard S. Boyle, who won a Nobel Prize in physics for the invention of the imaging device at the heart of digital cameras, has died in Canada, friends said.

Boyle, who died May 7 in his hometown of Wallace, Nova Scotia, was 86 and had been suffering from kidney disease, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday.

Boyle and his colleague George E. Smith won the Nobel Prize in 2009 for their work on the charge-coupled device, or CCD, found in a range of products from point-and-shoot cameras to bar-code readers, smartphones, photocopiers and medical imaging devices.

"Digital photography has become an irreplaceable tool in many fields of research," the Nobel committee said in its prize announcement. "The CCD has provided new possibilities to visualize the previously unseen. It has given us crystal clear images of distant places in our universe as well as the depths of the oceans …. These inventions may have had a greater impact on humanity than any others in the last half-century."

Boyle was born Aug. 19, 1924, in the Nova Scotia town of Amherst. When he was 3 the family moved to northern Quebec, where his father was a logging camp doctor, and Boyle was home-schooled by his mother because the nearest school was 30 miles away.

Boyle enrolled at McGill University in Montreal but dropped out in 1943 to join the Royal Canadian Navy, where he became a Spitfire pilot. He returned to McGill, earning his doctorate in physics in 1950.

He later moved to the United States to join Bell Labs, where he spent the rest of his career. After retiring from Bell in 1979, the family moved back to Wallace.

Boyle is survived by his wife of 65 years, Betty; a son, David; daughters Cynthia and Pamela; 10 grandchildren and a great-grandchild.