George E. Smith, a Bell Labs researcher who joined a colleague at a blackboard in 1969 to sketch out an idea that became the foundation for digital photography and applications such as deep space imagery — a breakthrough honored 40 years later with a Nobel Prize in physics — died May 28 at his home in Waretown, New Jersey. He was 95.

His death was confirmed by his son Carson Smith, but no cause was given.

At the core of the innovation envisioned by Dr. Smith and Willard S. Boyle (who shared in the 2009 Nobel Prize) was a phenomenon known as the photoelectric effect that was explored half a century earlier by Albert Einstein.

Dr. Smith and Boyle knew from Einstein’s work that light can dislodge electrons from metal and other surfaces. What they theorized — during a one-hour brainstorming session with chalk-drawn diagrams — was that the electrical charge emanating from the metal could be directed and stored.

That corralling of electrons, they proposed, could be used with semiconductors to build an image of the incoming light. “What you want is a photon to come in,” he said in a 2001 oral history, “and for every photon to make one electron that you can count.”

Their initial vision was for use in a proposed video phone, which was among the projects led by Dr. Smith and Boyle at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey (now Nokia Bell Labs). The then-futuristic concept, dubbed the PicturePhone, became the proving ground for their early work to test what they called the CCD, or charge-coupled device, to transform light into electronic signals.

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“We worked on it until the PicturePhone project was killed,” Dr. Smith told the Newark Star-Ledger. “The PicturePhone wasn’t commercially viable, and they wanted us to be profitable in the short run.”

The far wider potential for the CCD was soon evident after the patent was registered in 1974.

A team at Eastman Kodak unveiled a prototype digital camera in 1975 that was nearly as big as a shoebox and stored images, via CCD technology, on cassette tapes that held data for about 30 photos. The camera’s lead inventor, Steven Sasson, called it the moment that “an all-electronic camera” was shown to be possible even though the process was very different from today’s super-fast and high-resolution digital imagery.

“It only took 50 milliseconds to capture the image, but it took 23 seconds to record it to the tape,” Sasson told the New York Times in 2015. “I’d pop the cassette tape out, hand it to my assistant, and he would put it in our playback unit. About 30 seconds later, up popped the 100-pixel-by-100-pixel black-and-white image.”

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Astronomers, meanwhile, recognized how the CCD could advance their field by capturing images from light wavelengths not visible to humans, helping with fundamental questions about the nature of the cosmos. By the late 1970s, observatories were using CCD units in place of large photographic plates, beginning a transition toward far sharper and detailed images of the universe from lens such as those on the Hubble Space Telescope.

The rapidly advancing CCD technology also opened new frontiers in undersea exploration and image-guided surgeries.

The work started by Dr. Smith and Boyle eventually touched virtually every aspect of life, the Nobel Committee noted in the announcement of the physics prize. They shared the award with Charles K. Kao, who was recognized for work in fiber-optic cables. (Boyle died in 2011 in his native Nova Scotia.)

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“Masters of light,” said the Nobel statement. Their work helped build “the foundation to our modern information society,” added Gunnar Öquist, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Smith retired from Bell Labs in 1986 and spent 17 years at sea traveling the world in a 31-foot sailboat, named the Apogee, with his partner, Janet Murphy. In 2009, when the Nobel Prize was announced, he was busy scanning into his computer the thousands of photos from their odyssey.

“I certainly wish we’d had a digital camera,” he said.

George Elwood Smith was born in White Plains, New York, on May 10, 1930. His father worked as an insurance underwriter and often changed employers, requiring the family to move.

Dr. Smith was raised in seven states and attended nine elementary schools and five high schools, he recounted in the 2001 oral history with the Engineering and Technology History Wiki website.

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He served four years in the Navy in weather forecasting and later used the GI Bill to study mathematics. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 and received his doctorate in physics in 1959 at the University of Chicago. His dissertation, a compact three pages, examined electrical properties in semi-metals such as germanium.

Within Bell’s research teams, the full credit given to Dr. Smith and Boyle for the CCD development was challenged by two colleagues, Michael F. Tompsett and Eugene I. Gordon, who claimed they had key roles in advancing the initial technology. The dispute flared again after the Nobel decision.

Mr. Smith’s wife of 20 years, Janet Carson, died in 1975. His partner and sailing companion Murphy died in 2020. Survivors include three children; five grandchildren; seven great-grandchildren; and two sisters.

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When the call about the Nobel Prize came from Stockholm in October 2009, Dr. Smith heard the phone ring at 5:43 a.m. but didn’t get out of bed in time to answer. The message from the Nobel envoy, saying he would call back, went to voicemail.