Electric Josh

So my great uncle Paul died. I had only met him once, at a family reunion about ten years ago, and, being a physicist and being happy that I was becoming one, too, he gave me a green plastic slab that was rounded on one side such that it could be placed on a flat surface and spun, but only in one direction. Spinning the thing the wrong way would cause it to become unstable, rock around sort of awkwardly, and then settle down spinning the other way, never having flipped over. I suppose he was impressed enough with my half-correct explanation of how it worked, some kind of hand-waving cobbling together of moments of inertia and unstable equilibria. He was involved in the development of some early TV camera tubes and later worked on CCD's. Here he is talking about his work in 1975 (when I was two):

Well, I think that the solid-state devices are here to stay as exciting new devices. There still have not quite met our objective of building a really low-cost device. And you see that has been one of the objectives all along. One of the objectives was that a solid-state sensor, because it is made by the processes that one used in making integrated circuits, could be extremely low cost. It could be used in consumer-type applications where TV has never been used before.
...
Now, you see, if one could build this kind of device and build it cheaply, one has the possibility of going on to new types of consumer applications. The one type of consumer application that everybody thinks of, and Al Rose in particular around here has mentioned time and time again, if we have these kinds of cheap cameras and if we have a cheap method of storing the videos, then you see we are running with Eastman Kodak. We would then have a product which would really outsell any of the present kind of cameras, where you have to develop the film and send it off to be developed. It would even have advantages over the Polaroid-type thing where you use chemical photography. You get only a few pictures and they are relatively expensive, whereas you do all this electronically and you have it on tape or a tiny disk.

So that only took another 25 years. I now have a consumer-grade CCD camera, of course, and the green plastic slab is still somewhere in the house.
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