The charge-coupled device (CCD) converts the optical image into a processable electronic signal. Willard Boyle and George Smith conceived it at Bell Labs in 1969 in under an hour, while thinking about a new memory architecture. The photographic application was almost immediate, and its historical consequences are immense: digital astronomy, digital microscopy, consumer cameras, camera phones, and computer vision are all branches of the same tree. The CCD closes Wikinventia's long optical chain: from understanding how the eye works (Alhazen, Kepler) to digitizing what it sees (Boyle, Smith). Boyle and Smith received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009.