Willard Boyle

Willard Sterling Boyle (August 19, 1924 – May 7, 2011) was a Canadian applied physicist who shared one half of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics with George E. Smith for their invention of the charge-coupled device.

As director of Space Science and Exploratory Studies at Bellcomm, Boyle helped select lunar landing sites and provided support for the Apollo space program.

Willard Sterling Boyle was born on August 19, 1924, in Amherst, Nova Scotia, and moved to Quebec with his parents when he was about 2-years-old. He was homeschooled by his mother until the age of 14, when he began his formal education at Lower Canada College in Montreal.

Boyle attended McGill University, but his education was interrupted in 1943 when he joined the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II. He was loaned to the Royal Canadian Naval Air Service, where he learned how to land Spitfires on aircraft carriers as the war ended. After resuming his studies at McGill, Boyle gained a B.Sc. in 1947, and an M.Sc. the following year. In 1950, he received his Ph.D. with a thesis on mass spectrometry.

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.

In 1953, Boyle joined Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he invented the first continuously operating ruby laser with Don Nelson in 1962, and was named on the first patent for a semiconductor injection laser. 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. He returned to Bell Labs in 1964, working on the development of integrated circuits. Boyle was Executive Director of Research at Bell Labs from 1975 until his retirement in 1979.

In 1969, Boyle and George E. Smith invented the charge-coupled device (CCD), for which they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009. The CCD allowed NASA to send clear pictures to Earth back from space. It is also the technology that powers many digital cameras today. Smith said of their invention: "After making the first couple of imaging devices, we knew for certain that chemistry photography was dead." Eugene Gordon and Mike Tompsett, two now-retired colleagues from Bell Labs, claim that its application to photography was not invented by Boyle.

In retirement, Boyle split his time between Halifax and Wallace, Nova Scotia. In Wallace, he helped launch an art gallery with his wife, Betty, a landscape artist. He was married to Betty since 1946 and had four children, 10 grandchildren and 6 great-grandchildren.

In his later years, Boyle suffered from kidney disease. Due to complications from this disease, he died on May 7, 2011, at a hospital in Truro, Nova Scotia, at the age of 86.