Hounsfield, Sir Godfrey (1919-2004), a British electrical engineer, contributed to the development of the computed tomographic (CT) scanner. The CT scanner shoots a pencil-thin beam of X-rays through the body from many angles. Detectors measure the rays that pass through the body, and a computer converts the many views into a cross-sectional image. Previously, X-ray picture could only produce a single image showing all levels of the body at once. An American physicist, Allan Cormack, first worked out and tested the principles of CT scanning in the early 1960’s. Hounfield developed a full working system and was granted a patent for it in 1972. Hounsfield and Cormack shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for this work. See Cormack, Allan MacLeod .
Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield was born on Aug. 28, 1919, in Newark, Nottinghamshire, in the United Kingdom. During World War II (1939-1945), he served in the Royal Air Force. During his service, he trained people in radio and radar, and he studied electronics and radar in his spare time. After the war, he continued these studies at Faraday House Electrical Engineering College in London. In 1951, he joined the staff of EMI (now EMI Group), a music company that also manufactures many electronic products, where he carried out most of his research. Hounsfield worked on computers until the mid-1960’s, and then turned to using computers in X-ray and other applications. He was knighted in 1981. He died on Aug. 12, 2004.
