Canadian Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Dies at 86

Willard Boyle has been awarded nearly every science prize on the planet for creating, among many other things, the charge-coupled device.

Willard Boyle, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from Nova Scotia, died on Saturday at the age of 86. Boyle was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in developing the charge-coupled device, or CCD, a component that converts light or other inputs into digital data and is found in everything from cameras to bar-code scanners to telescopes. Boyle was born in Amherst, N.S., before moving to Quebec, where he was raised. An air force pilot in the Second World War, Boyle joined Bell as an engineer and, with his colleague, George Smith, developed the CCD, for which the two were honoured with the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physics. Boyle also developed a laser used in CD players and helped NASA select the spot for the moon landing in 1969.