The digital camera was cooled with dry ice before it fit in a phone
One early digital camera, built in 1972 for telescopes by researchers at MIT and Caltech, had its detector chilled with dry ice so it could hold exposures of up to an hour. It stored images of just 256 by 256 pixels on magnetic tape. Within three decades, phones were snapping pictures and emailing them.
The key part came from Bell Labs, where Willard Boyle and George Smith invented the charge-coupled device in 1969, the first semiconductor image sensor. Later sensors built on work at Olympus in 1985 and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1993, producing the CMOS chips that now dominate because each pixel carries its own amplifier and they use less power. Meanwhile space set the pace: from 1972 the Landsat 1 satellite's scanner, designed by Virginia Norwood, sent back more than 300,000 digital pictures of Earth over six years.
Hobbyists got an early taste in 1975 with the Cromemco Cyclops, whose sensor was a modified memory chip and whose plans appeared in Popular Electronics. The same year Steven Sasson at Kodak built a self-contained electronic camera. Sony's Mavica of 1981 still recorded analogue video onto a small floppy disk, and the first truly digital camera, storing images on a memory card holding ten shots, was the Fujifilm DS-1P unveiled in 1988.
Phones followed. A camera went into a device called Isaac, built for people with intellectual disabilities, in 1994. The first camera phone sold to the public was Kyocera's VP-210 in Japan in 1999, with a 110,000-pixel lens facing the user. Sharp's J-SH04, released in Japan in 2000, was the first mass-market model that could send photos instantly. By the early 2010s nearly every smartphone had a camera.
The story has a twist ending. In the early 2020s, young people on TikTok started hunting down compact digital cameras from the early 2000s, a nostalgic nod to the Y2K look that spilled onto eBay and Etsy.
Source: Digital camera
