An “electronic eye” co-inventor, Nobel laureate (2009) Willard Boyle was a Canadian physicist.
Boyle was born in 1927 in Amherst. He grew up in northern Quebec, his family moved there from Nova Scotia.
In 1969 Willard Boyle and George Smith, while working in Bell Laboratories, designed the first Charge Coupled Device (CCD). The CCD has become the bedrock of the digital imaging revolution including digital photography and video.