Steven Sasson, Eric Fossum, Joseph Woodland, Bernard Silver. You’ve almost definitely never heard of them, but they’ve changed your life in ways that affect you just about every day. They are among the inventors who were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame at its 29th annual induction ceremony in Washington last night. ...

Eric Fossum, working for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had the job of miniaturizing camera to fit on interplanetary spacecraft, and he wound up inventing the “camera on a chip” that is now in 90% of all cell phones and amounts to a $6 billion-a-year industry. Steven Sasson invented the digital camera itself, starting at Kodak in the 1970s with an eight-and-a-half-pound box connected to a magnetic tape drive and a TV set, which produced a .01 megapixel image.