NEWS POST: Four Inventors, Whose Work Spans Over Three Decades, Win The Queen Elizabeth Prize For Engineering

This 1972 edition of Electronics magazine shows the blurred first image 

The Queen Elizabeth Prize is a global £1million (US$1.2million) prize that celebrates a ground-breaking innovation in engineering.

It has run since 2013, when the first prize was awarded to the creators of the Internet, the browser and the World Wide Web. 

The prize rewards an individual or team of engineers whose work has had a major impact on humanity.

The prize also celebrates engineering as a discipline and career choice in an attempt to get more young people involved in the subject.

Dr Michael Tompsett, pictured with wife Margaret, was one of four winners of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, netting the award for inventing the digital camera. He is shown here with his original camera

As the inventor of the digital camera, you’d think that Dr Michael Tompsett would be a

rather enthusiastic snapper.

But the man whose ideas led to Instagram and the cameraphone actually bemoans the very ‘selfie culture’ that he helped to create.

And the 77-year-old Briton, who was yesterday awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering along with three others, has even admitted that at times he regrets inventing the device.

Speaking as he accepted the £1million award, the highest accolade for engineering, the pioneer admitted that he is irritated by people using digital cameras to take selfies.

He said: ‘I never take selfies. It’s totally unnecessary.

‘Here in London, for example, there are hordes of tourists even at this time of year and outside Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament you can’t go anywhere without people standing in the middle of the pavement taking pictures and taking selfies, and shoving selfie sticks in front of you.

‘At that point I just say, “Why the hell did anybody invent this stuff?”

‘How many people look at their selfies? It’s just to prove they are at a particular location.

‘I don’t think you are doing justice either to yourself or to the location, frankly.’ 

Dr Tompsett, who was originally from Writtle, Essex, and now lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, added: ‘Of course, it’s generational. I’m in the older generation and younger folks are doing this all the time.’

And despite his invention making it possible to take large numbers of pictures, he prefers to stick to just taking one or two.

The Cambridge graduate added: ‘Film was expensive, and I used to develop and print the pictures myself as well and it took a lot of time. 

'I would compose pictures in various ways very carefully.

‘I still tend to do that. Even though I could take ten, 20, 100 on my phone now, I tend just to take one.’

However, despite his apparent hatred of selfies, Dr Tompsett seemed happy to make an exception yesterday – taking a snap with two of his fellow prize winners: Nobukazu Teranishi, of Japan, and Eric Fossum from the US.

The CMOS device, also known as 'camera on a chip' technology, now features in most modern digital cameras

In the 1970s and 80s, they, along with fourth prize recipient American George Smith, developed a series of electronic sensors that transformed digital imaging and made most film-based photography redundant.

It began in 1971, when Dr Tompsett, who was working at Bell Laboratories in the US, realized a device invented by colleagues for computer memory circuits could have another use: taking pictures.

Called a ‘charge-coupled device’, it converts light to an electrical signal.

And in 1972, his wife Margaret appeared in the first colour digital image – on the cover of the magazine International Electronics. 

Professor Teranishi invented a device called the pinned photodiode, or PPD, which allows higher resolution digital images.

And Professor Fossum came up with the complementary metal oxide semiconductor, or CMOS, which led to ‘a camera on a chip’.

The £1million (US$1.2million) Queen Elizabeth Prize this year went to the developers of technologies that convert light into digital signals. Princess Anne is pictured giving the prize to (left to right) Dr Michael Tompsett, Professor Nobukazu Teranishi, and Professor Eric Fossum

However, while a Briton had a key role in inventing the digital camera, the biggest beneficiaries may have been in Asia, where most of the devices are manufactured.

But it wouldn’t be the first time that a British invention was exploited worldwide.

Other UK electronic creations include the television, made in 1925 by John Logie Baird, and the first video recorder, called the Telcan, which was invented in 1963 by Norman Rutherford and Michael Turner of the Nottingham Electronic Valve Company.

Originally published on Daily Mail UK