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Imagine a world where photography is a slow process that is impossible to master without years of study or apprenticeship. A world without iPhones or Instagram, where one company reigned supreme. Such a world existed in 1973, when Steven Sasson, a young engineer, went to work for Eastman Kodak.

Two years later he invented digital photography and made the first digital camera.

Mr. Sasson, all of 24 years old, invented the process that allows us to make photos with our phones, send images around the world in seconds and share them with millions of people. The same process completely disrupted the industry that was dominated by his Rochester employer and set off a decade of complaints by professional photographers fretting over the ruination of their profession.

It started out innocently enough.

Soon after arriving at Kodak, Mr. Sasson was given a seemingly unimportant task — to see whether there was any practical use for a charged coupled device (C.C.D.), which had been invented a few years earlier.

“Hardly anybody knew I was working on this, because it wasnȁ

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Steven Sasson

Steve Sasson invented the digital camera, changing the future of photography and transforming an industry.

Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Sasson always was drawn to exploring electronics. At age 13, he built an amateur radio and inadvertently sent a signal on a banned frequency, prompting a warning from the Federal Communications Commission and illustrating his early propensity to take risks.

Pursuing his interest in technology, Sasson attended Brooklyn Technical High School and then studied electrical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1972 and a master’s degree in 1973.

Also in 1973, he took a position at a research laboratory at the Eastman Kodak Co. doing what he enjoyed most: working with electronics. In an interview with the National Inventors Hall of Fame^®, Sasson said, “The most amazing thing about being at Kodak was that they paid me to do what I loved.”

In 1974, Kodak supervisor Gareth Lloyd tasked Sasson with investigating whether the recently created charged-coupled device (CCD) — a mechanis

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Steven Sasson facts for kids

Steven J. Sasson (born July 4, 1950) is an American electrical engineer and the inventor of the self-contained (portable) digital camera. He joined Kodak shortly after his graduation from engineering school and retired from Kodak in 2009.

Early life and education

Sasson was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Ragnhild Tomine (Endresen) and John Vincent Sasson. His mother was Norwegian.

He attended and graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School. He is a 1972 (BS) and 1973 (MS) graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in electrical engineering.

First self-contained digital camera

Steven Sasson developed a portable, battery operated, self-contained digital camera at Kodak in 1975. It weighed 8 pounds (3.6 kg) and used a Fairchild CCD image sensor having only 100 × 100 pixels (0.01 megapixels). The images were digitally recorded onto a cassette tape, a process that took twenty-three seconds per image. His camera took images in black and white. As he set out on his design project, he envisioned a camera without mechanical moving parts (alt