This year's Nobel Prize for Physics has gone to Willard Sterling Boyle and George Smith, inventors of the Charge-Coupled Device (or CCD), and Charles Kuen Kao, for his pioneering work on optical fibres.
Boyle and Smith were working in Bell Labs in New Jersey when, in October 1969, they formulated the idea for the CCD. Colleagues initially dismissed the concept, but once Bell Labs had produced a working prototype, the rest was history.
Boyle later recounted that "all hell broke loose" when he shortly afterwards presented a paper about the CCD at a conference in New York pondering "The Future of Integrated Circuits". At a stroke, he and Smith had laid the foundation for digital photography.
More: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/10/06/nobel_physics_prize/