The very first ct scanner prototype. Invented by Houndsfield at EMI. This picture was taken at the UKRC 2005 exhibition in Manchester G-MEX centre
- Godfrey Hounsfield the co-inventor of the CT scanner, for which he was awarded the 1979 Nobel prize in Physiology and Medicine, was born on Aug 29, 1919, in Newark, Nottinghamshire.
- Two years following the Nobel, he was honored with knighthood, becoming Sir Godfrey Hounsfield.
- Hounsfield left school at 16 with no qualifications, and the only degrees he received were honorary.
- Hounsfield never married, and would say late in life that he had not established a “permanent residence” until aged 60 years.
- Hounsfield joined EMI in 1951, where he initially worked on radar and guided weapons.
- Hounsfield was inspired from an idea which struck him on vacation: reconstructing a 3D image of a box by considering it as a series of slices.
- The prototype of what was called the EMI brain scanner (later renamed computed tomography) was installed at Atkinson’s Morley Hospital and the first human patient, a woman in her early forties with a suspected brain tumour, was examined on October 1, 1971 by James Ambrose.
- The first CT scanner took several hours to acquire the raw data for a single scan or “slice” and took days to reconstruct a single image from the raw data.
- Hounsfield, dismissed as a “crank” by many renowned radiologists during his career, passed away in 2004 at the age of 84, leaving behind one of the most important inventions in medical science history.
- The Beatles recorded for EMI but the profits did not fund the scanner research: this is an urban legend, although it is widely believed!