Kodak built a digital camera in 1975. Bosses asked who'd want it.

What the captions say

1. This is how Kodak engineer Steve Sasson built the first handheld digital camera in 1975, and his managers asked who would want it.
2. At the time, Kodak sold film, and had since George Eastman founded it in 1880.
3. Sasson joined Kodak in June 1973. It was his first job.
4. He asked to work with an electronic light sensor, and his boss told him to get one and play with it.
5. Nobody asked him for a camera. Years later he said, "Nobody even knew that I was developing this camera."
6. He built it from a Super-8 movie-camera lens, 16 batteries and a cassette recorder.
7. Some mornings in the shower he asked himself, "Why did I say I was going to build this stupid camera?"
8. In December 1975, it worked. The camera weighed 8 pounds. Each picture had 100 lines of 100 dots. Saving one picture to tape took 23 seconds.
9. The picture came up on a television set.
10. Then he showed it to Kodak's managers. He remembers curiosity, and skepticism.
11. They asked why anybody would want to take a picture this way, when there was nothing wrong with conventional photography.
12. Sasson later explained the managers' view: "Prints have been with us for 100 years."
13. Kodak patented the camera. In 2009, President Obama gave Sasson the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
14. Thirty-seven years after his camera first worked, on 19 January 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection.

Sources

• petapixel.com
• invent.org
• en.wikipedia.org