In 1975, a young engineer in the company that made Kodak film took the first picture on a handheld digital camera. Photography would never be the same again. When Steve Sasson started working at Eastman Kodak, the American photographic film manufacturer was a vibrant symbol of American industrial ingenuity.

    Set up by George Eastman in the 1870s, the company became synonymous with film photography thanks to their Kodak brand. People bought Kodak films and loaded them into Kodak-branded cameras. Their films were processed using Kodak development chemicals and they thumbed through the resulting prints on Kodak photographic paper. The company had even come up with a snappy slogan at the end of the 19th Century about this nose-to-tail process: "You push the button, we do the rest."

    But when a 23-year-old Sasson joined Kodak in 1973, he felt out of place. He wasn't a research chemist who would work on new films, nor was he a mechanical engineer ready to design new cameras that would work with Kodak films. Instead, he was an electrical engineer, and something about the whole photographic process didn't sit well with him.

    "When you first came to Kodak, you have to take photography lessons," Sasson, now 75, says over a video call with the BBC from his home office in the US. "You had to develop film. You had to go out and take pictures and study film and all that. And to be honest with you, I found it really annoying. You take your picture, you have to wait a long time, you have to fiddle with these chemicals.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251205-how-the-handheld-digital-camera-was-born