In what seems to be a somewhat obscure location, the monument and plaque for Willard Boyle are off the south side of the Sunrise Trail (Highway 6) at Wallace Bridge, NS. The monument is behind the Canadian National Historic Person monument for Simon Newcomb, which is immediately south of the highway, about 125 metres east of the east end of the Wallace River Bridge in the community of Wallace Bridge, Cumberland County, Nova Scotia.
Born August 19, 1924, in the nearby town of Amherst, Boyle's family soon relocated to the family home in Wallace, but within a few years moved to northern Quebec, where Boyle received his early education. He was enrolled in Lower Canada College, a private school, at the grade nine level, continuing on to McGill University, where he earned his PhD in Physics in 1950, though not without interruption. During World War II he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy Air Services, flying Spitfires.
After a short stint teaching at the Royal Military College Boyle began his very successful career with Bell Laboratories in 1953. It was there that he worked with concepts from the very small to the very large, from subatomic particles to cosmology. Boyle became well known as co-inventor of two significant technologies, the continuously operating ruby laser and the charged-coupled device (CCD), in 1969. (For the non-geek reader, see
this article for an explanation of what a CCD is, how it works and why its existence is very important to you.)
Many years after the invention and development (mostly by others) of the CCD Boyle and his research partner, George E. Smith, were awarded a Nobel Prize for their efforts. The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2009 was divided, one half awarded to Charles Kuen Kao "
for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication", the other half jointly to Willard Sterling Boyle and George E. Smith "
for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit - the CCD sensor".
Text from the plaque on the monument follows. On the monument are inscribed the morse code letters -.-. -.-. -.. (CCD).
Willard Sterling Boyle, C.C.
Inventor
Nobel Laureate (Physics, 2009)
Bill was from Wallace, where his grandfather worked in the quarry and kept the lighthouse. His father was the village doctor until their move to the backwoods of northern Quebec. While there, Bill was home schooled by his mother until age 14, when he went to Lower Canada College in Montreal. He attended McGill University in Montreal, and after serving in WWII where he flew Spitfires, he returned to McGill to earn a PhD in Physics. He spent most of his career at the Bell Laboratories in the United States, where he worked on ideas ranging in scale from the sub-atomic to the cosmic. In 1969, he and George Smith invented the charge-coupled device. An image sensor, the CCD serves as the electronic eye of digital cameras. It is also a central component of scientific and medical devices such as astronomical telescopes and instruments used for surgery. This invention earned them a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2009. Bill had a life-long enthusiasm for both arts and science and was always "experimenting." He retired to Wallace with his wife, Betty, in 1979, where he died in 2011 at age 86.