George Elwood Smith (May 10, 1930 – May 28, 2025) was an American applied physicist and a co-inventor of the charge-coupled device (CCD). Smith shared one half of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics with Willard Boyle "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit - the CCD sensor."
George Elwood Smith was born on May 10, 1930, in White Plains, New York. After serving in the United States Navy for four years and taking courses at the University of Miami, Smith qualified in 1952 as a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in physics and graduated with honors in 1955. He then became a graduate student of the University of Chicago, where he also worked as a teaching assistant. He received a Master of Science in 1956 and a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in 1959. At the time, his eight-page thesis on the electronic properties of semimetals was the shortest Ph.D. thesis in the history of the university.
In 1959, Smith joined the Technical Staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he headed the Device Concepts Group from 1964 until his retirement in 1986. His work was done in the VLSI Device Department at Bell Labs.
In 1969, Smith and Willard Boyle, a fellow Bell Labs researcher, invented the charge-coupled device, for which they were awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics.
In 1955, Smith married his wife Janet, with whom he had three children. They often sailed on weekends until her death in 1975.
After retirement, Smith and his life partner sailed around the world for seventeen years, crossing the Atlantic Ocean twice and sailing through the Panama Canal. They returned to New Jersey in 2003. He resided in the Waretown section of Ocean Township, Ocean County, New Jersey.
Smith died at his home in Barnegat Township, New Jersey, on May 28, 2025, at the age of 95.
Invention Hall of Fame Biography
Interview in Czech TV December 2013 (in English and Czech)
George E. Smith on Nobelprize.org