2/2/2017 The engineers who made 'selfies' possible share £1m prize

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/02/01/engineers­made­selfies­possible­share­1m­prize/ 1/17

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The engineers who made 'selfies' possible share £1m prize

The technology behind small digital cameras has created a new way of communicating CREDIT: REUTERS

By Alan Tovey, INDUSTRY EDITOR

1 FEBRUARY 2017 • 2:34PM

our engineers who invented the imaging technology used in digital cameras that has allowed “selfies” to become a global

phenomenon have been awarded a £1m prize in recognition of the work.

The prestigious Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering has gone to Michael Tompsett, Eric Fossum, George Smith and Nobukazu

Teranishi.

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2/2/2017 The engineers who made 'selfies' possible share £1m prize

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Their work - which was spread over three decades - has changed the world and how we see it, allowing the creation of digital cameras that

are cheap and small enough to fit on a fingertip, and whose pictures can be shared instantly through the internet.

Winners, from left, Michael Tompsett, Eric Fossum and Nobukazu Teranishi, try out their digital imaging inventions

Lord Brown of Madingley, who chairs the biennial prize - which was first awarded four years ago to Sir Tim Berners Lee for inventing the

internet - praised the “international collaboration” of this year’s winners, adding they had touched the lives of people worldwide, and

created a new form of communication.

“They have revolutionised the way we capture and analyse visual information. We deliberately chose an engineering invention that is

sustainable and has a proper commercial application,” he added, noting the digital cameras have applications as diverse as science,

astronomy, medicine - even driverless cars.

More than 100 cameras are manufactured a second around the world using technology developed by the winners, with 3bn images taken

on them shared every day.

The four winners’ breakthroughs were the charged coupled device (CCD), the pinned photodiode (PPD) and the complementary metal

oxide semiconductor (CMOS).

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2/2/2017 The engineers who made 'selfies' possible share £1m prize

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The digital image revolution started in the 1970s with the CCD, which converts light into an electrical signal, meaning an image can be

stored digitally. Dr Smith and Dr Tompsett pioneered this technology while working at Bell Laboratories in the US.

Picture sharing applications such as Instagram have created a new form of communication CREDIT: BLOOMBERG

Prof Teranishi invented the PPD while at electronics giant NEC the following decade. The PPD miniaturised light-capturing pixels,

resulting in more detailed images. In the early 1990s while working at Nasa, Dr Fossum came up with CMOS, which led to the creation of

“cameras on a microchip”, further reducing their size and cost.

British-born Dr Tompsett, who worked in TV originally, had an unusual prop to motivate him to produce a small camera.

“A colleague put a small lens in a perspex box the size of a matchbox to give us an idea of what we were aiming for,” he said. “He also put a

dead fly in there too as a recognition that there were bugs in the system.”

2/2/2017 The engineers who made 'selfies' possible share £1m prize

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/02/01/engineers­made­selfies­possible­share­1m­prize/ 4/17

Cameras in iPhones have helped change the way we see the world CREDIT: REUTERS

Despite the impact his work has had, Dr Smith said he was never aware of its world-changing implications as he was “too busy with

research”.

Dr Fossum added: “The impact of it did not sink in until I saw people walking around taking pictures with their phone - that was when I

realised the enormity of it, that everyone on the planet was using it.”

  

2/2/2017 The engineers who made 'selfies' possible share £1m prize

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MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY NASA ASTRONOMY INTERNET CAMERAS

The winners said that unlike their inventions, the shared prize fund is unlikely to change their lives. However, it could change the lives of

others: they are planning to use the money to fund scholarships intended to encourage young people - and particularly girls - into

engineering.

“Engineers like building things and being creative,” said Dr Smith. “That is what they do - we have got to get the momentum of that to

encourage people into engineering.”

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Harold Tate  2 Feb 2017 2:08AM

Sir Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web, the internet predated that by a few decades.  Please get the facts straight in what used to be a quality paper.

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Marcus Aurelius  1 Feb 2017 6:18PM

Personally, I would rather they had been strangled at birth...!

Rewarding someone for the banality of the selfie is just madness.

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