Willard Boyle

Willard Sterling Boyle (1924 to 2011) was a Canadian applied physicist who spent most of his career at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, and raised largely in northern Quebec, he studied at McGill University and took his doctorate there in 1950 with a thesis on mass spectrometry. At Bell Labs he and Don Nelson built the first continuously operating ruby laser in 1962, and in the late 1960s he turned to integrated circuits. In 1969 he and George E. Smith invented the charge-coupled device, the light-sensing chip that later sat inside digital cameras and let space missions return clear images. Boyle shared half of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics with Smith for that invention. He retired in 1979 after leading communications research at Bell Labs and died in Nova Scotia in 2011.