For much of the 20th century, the world’s premier industrial research facility was Bell Labs, research wing of the giant AT&T telephone corporation, in Murray Hill, New Jersey. From it came many key technologies that define the contemporary world. All of modern electronics, for example, stems from the invention of the transistor by three Bell scientists, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley.
Bell scientists also were responsible for the laser, many of the technologies used in radio astronomy and mobile phones, wireless local area networking, information theory, the Unix operating system and the C programming language. Seven Nobel prizes have been awarded for work done at Murray Hill.
The latest of these (for physics) was presented in Oslo last week to Willard Boyle and George Smith, who on Oct. 17, 1969, were trying to come up with an idea that would stop their boss’s boss switching resources from their work to another department working on sexy new kinds of computer memory. In a discussion that lasted “not more than an hour” (as Smith later recalled) they came up with a device that changed the way we see the world. They called it a charge-coupled device, or CCD, and it developed into the sensor at the heart of most digital cameras in use today.
If you want to see the fruits of their work, log on to Flickr.com, the world’s leading image-hosting site. Launched in 2004, it was bought by Yahoo in 2005 and now holds more than 4 billion images. Since you began reading this column, more than 600 pictures have been uploaded to it, automatically resized and each assigned a unique URL. It is one of the wonders of the modern world.
Of course you could view Flickr as a giant shoebox, in the sense that shoeboxes were traditionally the place where analogue photographs were stored. But that would be to underestimate its significance. For one thing, most images on Flickr are tagged by their owners, and one can then search for pictures tagged with a given word. A search for “Ireland,” for example, brings up more than 2 million images.
Most, as you would expect, are pretty banal — holiday snapshots, stag nights in Dublin, beach scenes, photographs of grandma with the statutory telegraph pole growing out of her head, family groups cut off at the knees and so on. But the search also reveals hundreds of terrific pictures, and a few images of staggering originality or beauty. And all are available for viewing by anyone, anywhere, with an Internet connection.
To appreciate what this means, you have to think back to film photography. Then, most of us took a camera on holidays and came back with a half-exposed roll of film that languished in the camera until Christmas, when it would be finished off with a dozen festive pictures of family, friends and uncles befuddled by drink. The film would then be taken into Jessops for processing, after which the resulting prints would be handed round whatever social circle was present — after which they would find their way into a shoebox and thence to the attic. Compared to Flickr, this wasn’t just a different world: It was a different universe.
Our present universe was made possible by what Boyle and Smith cooked up in that magical hour in October 1969. Of course it took a great deal of technical and manufacturing ingenuity to get the CCD from the crude prototypes knocked up in Bell Labs to the mass-produced sensors that now record the images that feed Flickr’s insatiable appetite. But it happened and cameras went from being expensive, delicate pieces of equipment to cheap add-on facilities for virtually every consumer device. We’ve moved from when you only carried a camera when you intended to take photographs to an era in which almost anyone with a mobile phone also carries a camera.
The big question, of course, is whether this is improving our general level of photographic skill. One would expect that it is, given that craft skills are acquired by trial and error, and digital photography enables one immediately to spot — and correct — errors. The evidence of Flickr is that the general standard of photography is improving, even when one discounts the fact that digital cameras make it difficult to take badly exposed or out-of-focus pictures. The world may be going to the dogs — but at least we are taking better photographs.
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