Godfrey Hounsfield
Godfrey Hounsfield invented the CT scanner at a record company. Born in 1919 on a Nottinghamshire farm, the youngest of five, he was an indifferent student who spent his childhood taking machinery apart and once launched himself off a haystack with a tar-barrel glider. He joined the RAF as a volunteer reservist in 1939, was found to have an aptitude for electronics, and taught radar mechanics through the war. A commanding officer arranged a grant for him to attend Faraday House in London, and he joined EMI in 1951 — a company whose profits from the Beatles funded a research laboratory with unusually loose direction. He led the team that built the EMIDEC 1100 in 1958, Britain's first all-transistor computer. The idea for tomography came to him around 1967, reportedly on a country walk: that a set of X-ray measurements taken from many angles could be reconstructed by computer into a cross-section of what lay inside, recovering the information that a conventional X-ray flattens away. The mathematics had been established by Johann Radon in 1917 and independently applied by Allan Cormack in the 1960s, which Hounsfield did not know. He built a prototype using a lathe bed and an americium source that took nine days to scan and two and a half hours to reconstruct one slice. The first patient scan, of a brain cyst, was made at Atkinson Morley Hospital in 1971. He shared the Nobel Prize with Cormack in 1979. The unit of radiodensity is named for him. He never married and spent his last decades tinkering in a home workshop.
- Lived: 1919 CE – 2004 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: engineer, inventor
