Willard Boyle:  New Inductee to the
Canadian Science & Engineering Hall of Fame

Randall Brooks and Helen Graves Smith

A Canadian whose invention revolutionized late 20th century astronomy was recently inducted into the Canadian Science & Engineering Hall of Fame.  A native of Nova Scotia and equipped with a PhD from McGill, Willard Boyle joined Bell Labs in New Jersey.  He later led the Lab’s research in lasers, optical and satellite communications, digital and quantum electronics, computing, and radio astronomy.  In1969, Boyle and George Smith conceived a new type of device, the charge-coupled device, that revolutionized astronomy and photography.  NSERC funded the first experimental CCD systems in Canada ca. 1978/79 at Laval, St. Mary’s and UBC.  Now the Hubble, Mars Rovers and CFHT — and virtually every other professional telescope — all depend on CCDs.

 

 
Willard Boyle (Property of AT&T Archives: Reprinted with permission of AT&T ) and a 10K RCA CCD (ca. 1980) acquired for the camera system developed at Saint Mary’s University.

Born in Nova Scotia, Boyle’s family moved to Chaudière, a logging community in northern Quebec at age three.  Following high school in Montreal, at age 19, Boyle joined the Canadian Navy to fight in World War II.  However, ships made him seasick so he applied to the Fleet Air Arm of the Navy and was sent to England.  After the war he took up his education again in Montreal completing a PhD in physics at McGill.  Three years later in 1953 he joined the prestigious Bell Labs in New Jersey.

At the Bell Labs, Boyle enjoyed fifteen years of collaborations and developed a brilliant invention worthy of note in its own right — the first continuously operating ruby laser co-invented with Don Nelson in 1962.  The first patent, with David Thomas, proposing a semiconductor injection laser soon followed.  That year he became director of Space Science and Exploratory Studies at Bellcomm where he provided technological support at NASA for the Apollo space program including choosing landing sites on the Moon.

Boyle returned to Bell Labs in 1964, switching to the development of electronic devices, particularly integrated circuits.  His success with lasers elevated the Canadian physicist to the position of Executive Director of Device Development.

However, his greatest achievement, accomplished in little more than an hour on 17 Oct. 1969, was a new type of IC device, the CCD, that Boyle and fellow Bell scientist George Smith conceived.  From a set of equations and diagrams sketched out on a blackboard, they had the Bell Labs’ shop try to make  the device — it worked exactly as expected.  A short time later, Boyle presented a paper about the new CCD invention at a conference on “The Future of Integrated Circuits”.  Response from scientists, engineers and industry was immediate and the pair went on to win awards for the device that is at the heart of virtually every camcorder, digital camera and telescope in use today.   His boss’s encouragement at the time was a mere "I guess there's probably a future in this semiconductor IC thing after all". 

To substantiate that understatement, Boyle and Smith were recently also the recipients of the National Academy of Engineering's (NAE) Charles Stark Draper Prize, one of the highest honours in engineering.

Since his retirement in1979, Willard and his wife have resided in Wallace, NS.

The Canadian Science & Engineering Hall of Fame is the core of the Canada Science and Technology Museum’s Innovation Canada  exhibit where Boyle joins 36 other outstanding scientists.  Also honoured in the Hall are Helen Sawyer Hogg and Gerhard Herzberg. 

The Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame in Ottawa

Other news at CSTM

Other recent events at CSTM with an astronomical link were the donations of a reticon and isocon by Gordon Walker which were previously used at UBC and reflect Gordon’s innovative work on measuring small radial velocities with these devices.  With the assistance of Murray Fletcher at DAO, an example of Harvey Richardson’s image slicers fabricated by the Observatory’s staff has also been added to the Museum’s astronomical collection. 

The ZEEP reactor (1945) from Chalk River (left) and Tokamak de Varennes on permanent exhibit at the Canada Science and Technology Museum

 

The exhibit Celebrating First Light focusing on the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Dominion Observatory in 1905  will shortly be reconfigured and downsized to fill a space beside the ZEEP nuclear reactor from Chalk River and the Tokamak de Varennes fusion reactor — all are of interest to astronomers.  CSTM is in Ottawa’s east end and CASCA members are invited to visit when in Ottawa and will be provided with a Museum pass on request to one of the authors.

Dr. Randall Brooks (Rbrooks@technomuses.ca)
A/Director, Collection & Research Division
Canada Science and Technology Museum

and Chair, CASCA Heritage Committee

Dr. Helen Graves Smith (Hgraves_Smith@technomuses.ca)
Ass’t Curator, Physical Sciences and
Space Canada Science and Technology Museum, Ottawa

Links:

Canadian Science & Engineering Hall of Fame / Le Panthéon canadien des sciences et du génie

Celebrating First Light / Centenaire De La Première Observation