Willard S. Boyle shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics for the invention at Bell Labs of the CCD imaging device that is at the heart of digital cameras. In 1969, Boyle and George E. Smith came up with the rudiments of the CCD. Within a year, they had produced a digital camera.
source latimes
Read more about Willard S. Boyle at: science.ca.
“Know how to judge when to persevere and when to quit. If you’re going to do something, do it well. You don’t have to be better than everyone else, but you ought to do your personal best.”
There is however controversy surrounding who was the first to invent the CCD.