In a parallel universe, a grilled cheese image of the Virgin Mary never sold for $28,000 after its image was uploaded on eBay. Wunderkind Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau never groped the chest of a cardboard Hillary Clinton on Facebook (at least not that anyone saw) and you never pretended not to recognize your boss on Match.com. That cousin? The one who apparently spends every moment of her awake time posting unflattering family reunion snapshots onto Flickr? In this parallel universe, that cousin has another passtime. She knits booties for your cat.
This odd false world - free from gourmands who photo-blog stylized meals, but also lacking joyous e-mailed images of new grandkids - bears only passing resemblence to the one we live in today. If we were making a movie about it, "It's a Wonderful Life"-style, this would be the world in which Steve Sasson had never been born.
In 1975, as a young engineer who had no interest in photography but had taken a job with Kodak because he heard Rochester was nice, he invented the digital camera.
"Nobody really knew what we were working on in that lab," Sasson says. "It's not that we were trying to be secretive, it's just that nobody cared. 'Why would anyone want to look at images on a screen? What's the point of an electronic photo album?' "
On Wednesday, in an evening ceremony in the East Room of the White House, President Obama awarded Sasson a 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on engineers and inventors. The other three medals went to the developer of dip-and-read urinalysis, the inventor of super glue, and the Intel team that first conceived of the microprocessor (Medals were also presented to winners of the National Medal of Science).
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