Phone cameras

or: a Nobel-winning eye for photographing lunch

In 1969 two scientists at Bell Labs came up with a chip that catches light as electrons and passes them down the line like buckets in a fire brigade, so a grid of silicon could finally see ¹, and that idea won them half of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics². Its great-grandchild in your pocket doesn’t even take one picture when you tap: in the dark it grabs up to 15 frames, lines them up, and merges them into one photo that looks better than what your eyes saw³.

And we use it to take pictures of our lunch.

How it works, badly

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Two scientists sketched a chip that catches light and passes it along.
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It won half of a Nobel Prize.
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Tap once, and it secretly takes a pile of photos and merges them.
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Then we point it at our lunch.

Wait, is that real?

Yes, the camera on your phone descends from a Nobel Prize, and it cheats.

The light bucket↩

Willard Boyle and George Smith came up with the charge-coupled device, or CCD, during a short meeting at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, in 1969. A photon hitting the silicon frees an electron, which collects in a little well under a metal gate; alternating voltages on neighboring gates then shuffle each pocket of charge along, gate to gate, until it reaches the edge of the chip and is read out as brightness.

The Nobel Prize↩

Boyle and Smith shared half of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit." The other half went to Charles Kao for his work on optical fiber, the glass inside undersea cables.

The burst↩

Google’s HDR+ mode, from 2014, merges a burst of short frames into one photo, using the last 9 or 15 frames. Its Night Sight mode, from 2018, captures up to 15 frames when the phone is handheld, each up to 333 milliseconds, or 6 frames of up to 1 second on a tripod, then aligns and merges them.

The fine print↩

Nearly every phone today uses a CMOS sensor, a cousin of the CCD rather than the CCD itself. The 15-frame figure is Google’s published number; other phones do similar tricks with their own counts. Michael Tompsett, also at Bell Labs, built the first imaging CCD, so the credit for the "camera" part is argued over. The fire brigade is our analogy, not Bell Labs'. Nobody has counted the lunch photos.

Sources: IEEE Spectrum: Nobel goes to Boyle and Smith for CCD camera chip; Google Research: Night Sight, seeing in the dark on Pixel phones

Last fact-checked October 29, 2026.