Alien Thinking by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241482018
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2021-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

WHO WANTS A DIGITAL CAMERA?

Former Eastman Kodak engineer Steven Sasson learned the importance of navigation the hard way. Although his journey of exploration resulted in the first digital camera, his failure to gain management’s support for the “camera of the future” illustrates how easily even a brilliant invention can be smothered in its cradle. To avoid that fate, ALIEN thinkers may need to fly under the radar while their innovations are in the early stages of development, recruit influential supporters, and position their offerings in ways that don’t overtly threaten the status quo. Your success may hinge on meeting not just one or two of these challenges but all three of them.

Sasson’s innovation trek began in 1973 when he joined Kodak. Soon thereafter, the twenty-four-year-old was given the seemingly minor task of seeing whether there was a practical use for a charge-coupled device (CCD), which had been invented a few years earlier. (A CCD is a sensor that detects light and converts it into digital data.)

“Hardly anybody knew I was working on this,” he later told a reporter, “because it wasn’t that big of a project. It wasn’t secret. It was just a project to keep me from getting into trouble doing something else.”2 As he recounted in a 2011 speech, “It was a very small project and, therefore, it had no real management, no one asking how things were going or anything like that …. Nobody was paying attention, we had no money, and nobody knew where we were working. So the situation was just about perfect.”3

Over the next two years, the efforts of Sasson and a couple of technicians to discover a practical use for the CCD produced an unexpected result—a “Rube Goldberg device with a lens scavenged from a used Super-8 movie camera; a portable digital cassette recorder; 16 nickel cadmium batteries; an analog/digital converter; and several dozen circuits—all wired together on half a dozen circuit boards.”4 It was the world’s first digital camera.

But it was “more than just a camera,” said Sasson. “It was a photographic system to demonstrate the idea of an all-electronic camera that didn’t use film and didn’t use paper, and [used] no consumables at all in the capturing and display of still photographic images.”5

Sasson and his colleagues made a series of demonstrations to Kodak executives from various departments. He brought the digital camera into conference rooms, took photos of people in the room, and uploaded the images to a television. “It only took 50 milliseconds to capture the image, but it took 23 seconds to record it to the tape. I’d pop the cassette tape out, hand it to my assistant and he put it in our playback unit. About 30 seconds later, up popped the 100 pixel by 100 pixel black and white image.”6

Although the camera could have stored hundreds of images, Sasson deliberately set a limit of just thirty images. He chose that number because it fit snugly between the twenty-four and thirty-six images available on standard rolls of Kodak film.

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