On the afternoon of 17 October 1969, George E. Smith walked into the office of his boss, Willard Boyle, who led Bell Labs’ semiconductor division at the time. As usual, the two physicists discussed possible devices, but that day turned out to be special. After about an hour of trading ideas and drawing diagrams, Boyle and Smith invented the charge-coupled device.
Boyle and Smith’s first CCD had just eight pixels arranged in a line. Seven years later, Lockheed built an 800-by-800-pixel CCD camera and installed it on the KH-11, a military spy satellite and precursor to the Hubble Space Telescope. By the 1980s, consumers could buy digital cameras that had CCDs, not photographic film, in their focal planes.
Although Boyle and Smith set out to build a digital imager, the application they and Bell Labs’ management had in mind was video telephony. Skype, FaceTime, and other video-messaging services do indeed make use of CCD cameras, but video messaging didn’t catch on until the mid 2000s.
According to its champions, basic scientific research yields big and unpredictable benefits. The precise timing of microwave signals that underlies GPS wouldn’t be possible without corrections calculated using Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Lord Rayleigh, who oversaw his family’s estate in Southern England, might have been pleased to learn that the gas he isolated and discovered, argon, is now used for asphyxiating poultry.
But as the CCD example shows, unintended payoffs can even flow from applied research. That observation was on my mind this week when I learned from MIT Technology Review of a cheap miniature accelerometer. Made by a Silicon Valley–based startup called mCube, the device measures just 2 × 2 × 1 millimeters. According to the news story, mCube plans to incorporate the device into clothing.
mCube's accelerometer combines two technologies: MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) and ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit). CREDIT: mCube
My first reaction to the story was to wonder why anyone would want their clothes to report on the acceleration of their torso and limbs. Curious, I visited the company’s website, where I discovered that there are several uses for tiny, low-power motion detectors. For example, athletes and other physically active people could use them to monitor their workouts both inside and outside the gym. The sensors are so light and small that they would barely affect performance.
I don’t doubt that other uses for tiny accelerometers will be devised—and not just by the companies that make them. Biologists could use the devices to study animal locomotion. Bicycle helmets could incorporate them to record data in the event of accidents. Physical therapists could use the devices to help limbless veterans walk with prostheses.
When challenged by his daughters Goneril and Regan about why he needed a large entourage of knights, Shakespeare’s King Lear cried in exasperation, “O, reason not the need!” In the case of new technologies, however, reasoning needs is worthwhile and potentially profitable. Indeed, if you teach engineering, you might consider challenging your students to devise novel applications for the latest phenomena described in the pages of Applied Physics Letters and Physical Review Letters.
This essay by Charles Day first appeared on page 104 of the November/December 2014 issue of Computing in Science & Engineering, a bimonthly magazine published jointly by the American Institute of Physics and IEEE Computer Society.
