Godfrey Hounsfield was born on 28 August 1919 in Newark, England. The young Hounsfield was sent to Magnus Grammar School in Newark.
Hounsfield did not shine at school, although he showed some aptitude in physics and mathematics. He was rather lacking in self-confidence and tended to be somewhat introverted. Since his childhood, he displayed an uncanny interest in fiddling with electrical gadgets and machineries.
At the outbreak of World War II, Hounsfield joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) as a volunteer reservist. This gave him the opportunity to study the books that the RAF provided for radio mechanics.
By 1967, Godfrey Hounsfield had been working for music and electronics company Electrical and Musical Industries (EMI) for 16 years on projects ranging from radar, guided weapons, and the UK’s first all-transistor computer.
In 1963, Johannesburg-born physicist Allan MacLeod Cormack, who later became an American citizen, had been working on the concept of scanning slices of the body from various angles and rotations.
In 1971, Hounsfield built the first working scanner. While an X-ray machine uses a single ray to create a two-dimensional image, the CT scan uses a row of X-rays in a tube that rotates around the body to take pictures from different angles. The result is a detailed image which, after a computer processes the data, creates a three-dimensional cross section of a patient’s body.
For these inventions, Hounsfield and Cormack received a Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1979. Until the end of his life, Godfrey Hounsfield worked on perfecting the CT scanner, directing his interests towards magnetic resonance imaging.
He died on Aug 12, 2004 at the age of aged 84 years
British engineer Godfrey Hounsfield (1919 – 2004)
