Willard Boyle
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Willard S. Boyle | |
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Life
Born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, he is the son of a medical doctor and moved to Quebec with his father and mother Beatrice when he was three.[5] He was home schooled by his mother until age fourteen, when he attended Montreal's Lower Canada College to complete his secondary education.[5] Boyle attended McGill University, but his education was interrupted in 1943, when he joined the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II.[5] He was loaned to the Britain's Royal Navy, where he was learning how to land Spitfires on aircraft carriers as the war ended.[5] He gained a BSc (1947), MSc (1948) and PhD (1950) from McGill University.[6]Career
After receiving his doctorate Boyle spent one year at Canada's Radiation Lab and two years teaching physics at the Royal Military College of Canada.[5] In 1953 Boyle joined Bell Labs where he invented the first continuously operating ruby laser with Don Nelson in 1962,[7] and was named on the first patent for a semiconductor injection laser.[7] He was made director of Space Science and Exploratory Studies at the Bell Labs subsidiary Bellcomm in 1962, providing support for the Apollo space program and helping to select lunar landing sites.[7] He returned to Bell Labs in 1964, working on the development of integrated circuits.[7]In 1969, Boyle and George E. Smith invented the charge-coupled device (CCD), for which they have jointly received the Franklin Institute's Stuart Ballantine Medal in 1973, the 1974 IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award, the 2006 Charles Stark Draper Prize, and the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics.[6][7]
Boyle was Executive Director of Research for Bell Labs from 1975 until his retirement in 1979. In retirement, he settled in Wallace, Nova Scotia, and helped launch an art gallery with his wife Betty, a landscape artist.[5] He has been married to Betty since 1947, and has four children, 10 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.[3] In 2009, he and his wife live in Halifax.[3] He was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2010.[8]
George E. Smith
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For other people named George Smith, see George Smith (disambiguation).
George E. Smith | |
Born | May 10, 1930 White Plains, New York |
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Smith was born in White Plains, New York. Smith served in the US Navy, attained his BSc at the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 and his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1959 with a dissertation of only three pages.[2] He worked at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey from 1959 to his retirement in 1986, where he led research into novel lasers and semiconductor devices. During his tenure, Smith was awarded dozens of patents and eventually headed the VLSI device department.[3]
In 1969, Smith and Willard Boyle invented the Charge-Coupled Device (CCD),[4] for which they have jointly received the Franklin Institute's Stuart Ballantine Medal in 1973, the 1974 IEEE Morris N. Liebmann Memorial Award, the 2006 Charles Stark Draper Prize, and the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Both Boyle and Smith were avid sailors who took many trips together. After retirement Smith sailed around the world with his wife, Janet, for seventeen years, eventually giving up his hobby in 2003 to "spare his 'creaky bones' from further storms."[3] He currently resides in Waretown, New Jersey.