New York - George Smith, 79, was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for his work with colleague Willard Boyle developing technology that is the basis of digital photography. He worked at Bell Laboratories until his retirement in 1986. Born in 1930 in White Plains, New York, Smith served in the US Navy and then briefly studied mathematics before switching to physics.
He earned a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1959 with a dissertation of only three pages, which he later described as "short, but pretty good."
The same year he began work at Bell, where he would be awarded dozens of patents and work his way up to head of the VLSI device department.
Like Boyle, Smith was a serious sailor and the two took many sailing trips together. After his retirement, Smith sailed around the world for five years, according to and interview he gave to the Institutes of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He only gave up the hobby in 2001 to spare his "creaky bones" further storms.
Smith was awarded the Nobel Prize along with Boyle, a joint Canadian-US citizen, for their work creating an image semiconducting circuit, or charge coupled device (CCD). They share the prize with Hong Kong professor Kuen Kao for his work on fibre optics.
