Kodak Invented the Digital Camera and Then Shelved It for 25 Years

In December 1975, Steven Sasson, a 24-year-old engineer in Kodak's Apparatus Division, demonstrated a prototype to about a dozen managers in Rochester. The device was eight pounds, wired up from a Fairchild CCD sensor lifted from a movie camera, sixteen nickel-cadmium batteries, and a Motorola digital cassette recorder. It captured a 100 by 100 pixel black-and-white image, took 23 seconds to write to tape, and another 30 seconds to read back to a custom television display. The first photo was of a lab assistant. Sasson called the result 'film-less photography.'

Kodak's executives were not enthusiastic. They asked good questions — how long until the resolution rivaled film? Sasson estimated 15 to 20 years — and concluded that nothing about the device required immediate action. The company's profits came almost entirely from selling film, paper, and chemistry to consumers and professionals. Anything that replaced film with reusable storage threatened a virtuous cycle that funded everything else.

Kodak filed the patent (US 4,131,919, granted 1978) and shelved the project. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the company introduced digital products — but as additions to its film business, not replacements. Engineers describe being told repeatedly that any digital roadmap had to leave the film economics intact. Competitors made different choices. Sony, Canon, Casio, Nikon all moved earlier and harder. Sasson eventually became Kodak's chief patent strategist; the company defended his patents fiercely while losing the underlying market.

Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on January 19, 2012. By then, the relevant patents were close to expiring. The estate sold a portfolio of about 1,100 imaging patents to a consortium led by Apple and Google for $525 million in late 2012 — a fraction of the company's earlier valuation, and a final, ironic transaction.