One question never stopped being asked: when would this technology be viable? "I had to come up with an answer. So I called the research labs, and I said, 'How many pixels would I need in order to have equivalent film quality of 110 film', which was like the worst film format you could find." The lab said he would need a million pixels, or two million if the image was going to be in colour.

"I've got 10,000 black and white pixels," Sasson says. He turned to an observation called Moore's law, which said that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubled every two years as the technology matured. "Nobody was questioning Moore's law. This was completely digital. I had no idea if CCD technology would follow Moore's law. I doubted if it would, but, you know, I'm desperate. So I did a calculation, and I said, 'Between 15 and 20 years'." Kodak's first consumer digital camera, the DC40, came out in 1995 – 18 years after Sasson's prediction.

"Complete luck," he says. "I take no credit for that prediction. I was so desperate just to get a number out there that was based on something, you know. So if they wanted to challenge it, I'd say, 'Well, here's Moore's law. You go argue with Moore's law.'"

In 1978, Kodak was granted the first patent for a digital camera. It was Sasson's first invention. The patent is thought to have earned Eastman Kodak billions in licensing and infringement payments by the time they sold the rights to it, fearing bankruptcy, in 2012.