One would forgive Steve Sasson for despondency, yet when sixteen years of his work was buried, he was sanguine instead. I want to know how. What internal energy source enables explorers to persist, cheerfully, when faced with failure?
Sixteen years is a big bite out of a career. It’s a big bite out of a life. Sixteen years of grinding frustration, and external discouragement. Then at long last, he produced an unambiguous, undeniable success in 1989. That success was the death knell for his project, as we’ll see. It’s now on display, perhaps as a momento mori, in the Eastman Museum, the world’s oldest museum of photography.
Steve Sasson invented the digital camera, a truly omnipresent device these days. Cameras are not only all around us; they’re inside our heads too. They pervade our imaginations. We have both nightmares about invasions of our privacy and fantasies about utopia. The ability to travel, for example, anywhere, anytime, instantly through images. Deeper still, some owe their lives to the digital camera, literally. A retina scan sent to a citybound specialist can diagnose life-threatening diabetic conditions for residents of remote communities, for example. If you live in a remote community, a camera that connects you to an ophthalmologist is equivalent to teleportation. A miracle. Sasson’s invention shapes our world, and changes people’s lives.
None of this was clear to anybody in 1973, when Sasson began work. After a tepid response to his first completed prototype in 1975, he found space and time to spend fourteen more years building a stunning piece of technology, together with colleague Robert Hills. An accidental skunkworks, hidden not by secrecy but through disinterest. The world’s first DSLR, with a 1.2 megapixel sensor, was unveiled in 1989. The Kodak Tactical Camera. The idea’s time had come. There was no doubt the camera was ready for the big time. That it could take over the world. It could no longer be mistaken for some jerry-rigged daydream. What had been a theoretical threat to the business of selling film was now real, and so it had to be stopped.
Kodak smothered the project with neglect. They declined to manufacture the camera. They wouldn’t sabotage their main line of business, and so they sabotaged their whole business in the end. Kodak’s abdication from the top of the pile, and eventual demise, is a story of its own but today I want to learn about Sasson. What personal characteristics let him move on from the assassination of his child without bitterness? Perhaps we can learn something by tracing a lineage of inventors, keeping an eye out for common motivations.
George Eastman
The funny thing is that Kodak’s heritage was rich with the imperative to innovate. Blood may be thicker than water. At Kodak, their blood was thick with t-cells designed to attack the status quo. For most of its history, Kodak was almost violently innovative. They had little remorse about killing their earlier creations with new ones.
George Eastman, founder of Kodak, came to photography as a real estate investor. Then, as now, real estate agents loved photographs. Back then, though, perhaps the love affair was soured by the high maintenance process of taking photos. Behind every photograph was a portable lab full of equipment that had to be transported and used on site. Portable being a slight exaggeration. Not only were wet-plate cameras, with their wooden tripods and black cloaks, famously bulky, but there was a tent full of equipment lurking in the background. The plates had to be prepared and developed in situ, using barrelfuls of liquid chemicals.
To Eastman, this looked crazy. And it also looked like an opportunity. By dint of herculean personal effort - I’m skipping details for brevity, but this was a non-trivial matter - Eastman managed to produce commercially available dry plates. Instead of having to construct a chemistry lab en plein air, every aspiring photographer could now travel light,with only a crate of dry plates. This revolutionised photography. Its reach was enormously expanded. Photographs could now be carted back from so many new places. But Eastman did not stop there. He constantly produced new products that obviated the need for the old ones.
Eastman subsequently produced a camera pre-loaded with film. To name that camera, he invented the word Kodak. Then, in 1889, a century before Sasson’s DSLR, film stock was first released as a separate product. Henry Reichenbach, a chemist working for Eastman, had developed a method for producing flexible film, cured over glass plates and then peeled off. By beginning to supply the essential ingredient for a working camera - film - Eastman Kodak was also a hundred years ahead of the successful Intel Inside marketing campaign for microprocessors. This flexible film was also packaged into reels for recording motion pictures. Star Wars, for example, ended up being shot on Kodak film stock. R2-D2, arguably the film’s star, ended up being built at the same time as Steve Sasson’s prototype digital camera, and if you can picture R2-D2, you can almost picture what that camera looked like. Small world.
Apart from astute business sense and a clear technical vision he wanted to realise, there was another driving force in George Eastman’s life. A desire to give back. Perhaps it began with gratitude to his mother, who raised him in challenging circumstances. One of his constant hopes was to smooth away some of the hard edges of a hard life for her. Regardless of what started it, Eastman was expansively philanthropic. He donated huge sums of money to everything from the Eastman School of Music, to MIT, to schools of dentistry and medicine, and to university educations for traditionally underprivileged people. Perhaps, having made his fortune in photography, he saw human lives as little points of light, worth seeing and worth nurturing.
How does Steve Sasson fit into this legacy? Let’s zoom in on a day of work out of the sixteen years he put in, to see whether he lived up to Eastman’s example of innovation emerging from years of intellectual struggle.
Building the prototype
Gunpei Yokoi was the creator of the GameBoy and a creative kindred spirit to Sasson. He had a maxim that neatly described on part of Sasson’s art: “lateral thinking with withered technology”. This meant combining well understood technologies in clever new ways. Boring puzzle pieces; exciting new compositions. Steve Sasson did this. He used lenses from existing cameras, nicked from production lines downstairs from his workspace. He used well understood analogue to digital conversion (ADC) chips, pioneered by Bernard Marshall Gordon in the 1950s. These chips translate the analogue world that we experience into the digital world of numbers. He used standard cassette tapes to record digital images, years before the Commodore 64 used them to record games.
But he also needed a brand new component - the charge coupled device (CCD) first produced at Bell Labs in 1969. The early CCD measured the level of light and turned it into a measurable voltage, at 10 000 separate points on its tiny surface. Images - two dimensional collections of points of light - are turned into arrays of numbers. Each point of light is turned into an analogue voltage, then converted to a digital number. Light, CCD, ADC, numbers. Techno pointillism. The CCD, in fact, was the whole point of the project. To give this new electronic device meaningful work. That was untrodden ground, with no prior art to turn to for reassurance. And so Sasson would have spent his days cutting through a jungle of intellectual undergrowth with wire cutters, trying to work out where in the world he was. Every time he had a new idea, he had to verify it through the medium of the soldering iron and the breadboard, little pixels of coloured plastic gathering on his workbench as he stripped the insulation from one strand of wire after another. Hours of fiddly work separated every new idea from knowing whether it was promising, or a dead end. Agonising, enervating intellectual work, day after day.
Like an acrophobic hiker steering course away from cliff edges to avoid confronting their fear of heights, Sasson was guided by his self-confessed discomfort with mechanical engineering. He worked for two years to strap together a jarring creole of technologies into a completely digital camera, so he could avoid any moving parts. A rebuke to a proud tradition of mechanical art underlying camera making. A digital heresy.
But at the same time, a useful guiding principal. Enough, in any case, to steer the way to a working prototype. Imagine a cubic version of Star Wars’ R2-D2, with no legs, and you’re almost picturing the camera. R2-D2’s iconic hologram projector was a salvaged Vickers Viscount aeroplane reading lamp; the camera’s eye was a lense repurposed from a Super 8 film camera. But to a casual observer, they looked almost the same. Below that, a bellyful of aluminium framework, ribbon cables and prototyping circuitboards. It was carried into multiple meeting rooms in 1975 to be demonstrated to company executives.
The demonstration embodied the artist’s plight: the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at once and still be functional. It was simultaneously deeply impressive and completely underwhelming. Each time he demonstrated his camera, Sasson would take a monochrome photo of the attendees in the anodyne fluorescent lighting that defined office space for decades. The 100x100 pixel image would be captured in 50 milliseconds, but then took 23 seconds to be recorded onto cassette tape. Did Sasson have some engaging patter to fill these 23 seconds? I don’t know.
And then the tape would be ejected, walked over to a display unit, where it would take another 30 seconds to be read, and displayed on a television screen. Years before sneakernet went live, these guys were doing it. But they were hamstrung by the fact that executives could not picture people looking at their photos on a television. And perhaps were underwhelmed by the resolution, compared to film. After all, a skilled artist could possibly shade in a 100x100 piece of graph paper with a 2B pencil in the same amount of time.
And so after the prototype was shown, the project was left in limbo. Not frivolous enough to cancel, but not enough ignite burning excitement for anyone. With that lukewarm level of interest, Sasson kept working for another fourteen years, until the final artefact was delivered, and it was clear that the camera had come to the end of the road at Kodak.
We’ve traced the development of photography from somewhere near its beginnings, through its ascension into the digital realm. And we can keep following it forwards to see what the next generation of cameras is up to.
And now
The landscape has changed, but the quest for the new in the face of skepticism continues. These days, perhaps, the torch is carried by people like Andrej Karpathy, head of artificial intelligence for autonomous vehicles at Tesla. In Karpathy’s case, he has great interest from his employer, but the rest of his industry thinks he has no hope of delivering his project. The pixels are different; the disdain remains the same.
What components is Karpathy trying to combine in new ways? Now, suddenly, the digital camera itself is a “weathered technology”. It’s taken for granted that this is a working, off the shelf component. The cars Karpathy works with have eight of them built in. And neural networks. It’s now de rigueur that you can buy a chip to perform efficient calculations in a way that mimics a biological brain. Karpathy’s project does not want for hardware building blocks.
The frontier for Karpathy is to collect enough information about human behaviour for his cars to reliably predict it, and therefore safely drive amongst human drivers. Instead of tangling with a jungle of colourful wires, Karpathy is wrangling an unwieldy specimen collection comprising human quirks. This world is no less strange or inscrutable that the hidden world of electrons, which is only visible through the measurements of a multimeter. This is the world human intent, revealed only through human action and measured with cameras and algorithms. Will the father with a pram try to risk crossing the road ahead of the car? Will the drunk teenager suddenly stumble into what was previously drivable space? And indeed, is that even a person over there? Is that flowing red fabric a scarf, or is it a rag blown by the wind around a discarded mannequin on the curb?
The sensor is no longer a CCD transforming light into voltage in a giant matrix. Karpathy’s sensor is a network of cars, transforming observations of humans into a matrix of data. The pixels are now vehicles. And those pixels observe behaviour; possibly even human nature.
How on earth is this a continuation of Eastman’s legacy of philanthropy, though? It turns out that the origin myth of autonomous vehicle research is a deeply humanist goal. The premise which gave birth to autonomous vehicles is that they will reduce road deaths by driving vehicles more safely. And even though you’re possibly skeptical of the motives, there is a sturdy substrate of belief that autonomous cars will make life better for people. Equitable access to transport for elderly people, or people underserved by public transport. The opportunity to transform our urban centres by reclaiming the sprawling wasteland of parking space. The possibility of transforming private vehicle ownership into a shared utility, reducing resource consumption. So the points of light that are human lives glow in the background of this ambitious project as well.
Now we’ve traced 150 years of technical innovation, groping our way along a braided cord. A cord braided from threads including hunger for progress, and concern for human lives. Finally, perhaps we have gathered enough material to guess what energises somebody like Steve Sasson to keep creating, even faced with a disinterested audience. One key, I think, is this: his fealty is not to an employer, or even to a pet project. He can’t sink with that ship, when it’s not his ship. He is committed instead to a vision. So what is that vision? We’ve touched lightly on what Eastman’s vision may have been, and what Karpathy’s vision may be, but we’ve only talked about Sasson’s work, not his vision.
These days, Sasson spends his time passing on the tradition to new generations. He travels and talks to kids about engineering, trying to give them an appreciation of the cultural practices that make the magic happen. Trying to draw the kids into a world where they, too, can manifest what’s in their imagination. To have agency in their worlds. To give them a taste of the incalculable value of trying shit out, failing, and trying again. It’s the story of every children’s bedtime story, when you get down to it.
This, I think, is the key to understanding the motivating force. He sees himself as a custodian of an important legacy of creation. This custodianship, of the flame of creativity and curiosity, is something I see playing a key role in artists of all stripes. The importance of that custodianship - the significance it has for every artist’s community - is something that I believe imbues a life with meaning, and from meaning comes energy.
The vision is to explore, push boundaries, and to keep carrying the torch of exploration, to pass on to others coming up. To “do unto others what’s been done to you”, as Maynard James Keenan put it. This torch is not embodied in a company, or a project. It’s carried by a lineage of people who decide to pick it up and carry it. It’s safeguarded and passed on in due course, when the students are ready. Those potential students, those potential recipients of this ageless legacy, are the points of light that make everything happen.