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In 1975, a 24-year-old engineer at Eastman Kodak was quietly building something no company had ever made before.
Steven Sasson wired together spare parts, lenses, and a cassette tape recorder into a box the size of a toaster.
It worked. The device captured a black-and-white image without a single frame of film inside it.
Recording the photo took 23 seconds, and viewing it required hooking the camera up to a television screen.
Sasson demoed it for Kodak executives expecting excitement, but he later said their reaction was closer to dread.
Kodak's entire empire ran on selling film, so a camera that needed none looked less like progress and more like a threat.
The company sat on the patent for years while rivals raced ahead, and in 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy in the digital age it had quietly invented.