Getting His Due

The New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame boasts an impressive list of accomplished scientists, physicists, and innovators whose ideas flourished right here at home.

Courtesy of Michael Tompsett.

At the heart of virtually every digital camera, from cell phones to giant astronomy telescopes, lies an image sensor known as a charge-coupled device, or CCD. For inventing the CCD, Bell Labs scientists Willard Boyle and George Smith were inducted into the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame in 2008 and shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics.

There was just one problem. “To match the Nobel citation, it should have been the three of us up there,” says Dr. Michael Tompsett, who was at Bell Labs in Murray Hill from 1969 to 1989. “Boyle and Smith have a patent for the CCD concept, but it applies to creating digital memory. Their patent does not mention imaging. My patent is the first one that describes charge-coupled imagers, and I made the first CCD, charge-coupled imaging devices and video cameras.”

Still, it’s never too late. Tompsett is the only one of four inventors being inducted into the state’s inventors hall of fame (njinvent.org) this month to be given “pioneer status.” Tompsett, who these days runs an electronic medical records company in New Providence, doesn’t hold a grudge. After all, he says, “That isn’t my only claim to fame.”

Indeed. “He’s done so many things, that’s why we’re inducting him,” says Gertrude M. Clarke, president of the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame. Among other things, Tompsett, who holds eighteen patents, also invented the technologies underlying thermal/night-vision cameras such as those used by firemen and the military.

A native of England, Tompsett came to this country in 1969. “We’ve brought up four children in New Jersey, and it’s been very enjoyable,” he says. New Jersey is the only state with its own inventors hall of fame, established in 1987. The induction ceremony, which will include awards and citations for other New Jersey inventors, will be held on October 14 at the W Hotel in Hoboken.

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