Hounsfield, Sir Godfrey Newbold

Hounsfield, Sir Godfrey Newbold,

1919–2004, British electrical engineer. A radar expert for the Royal Air Force during World War II, in the 1950s Hounsfield began developing computer and X-ray technology for EMI, Ltd., an international electronics and entertainment corporation. He built the prototype for the first CAT scanCAT scan
[computerized axial tomography], X-ray technique that allows relatively safe, painless, and rapid diagnosis in previously inaccessible areas of the body; also called CT scan.
..... Click the link for more information.
 machine, which originally was designed to produce detailed images of cross-sections of the human head, in 1972. For this innovation he shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Allan CormackCormack, Allan MacLeod
, 1924–98, American physicist, b. Johannesburg, South Africa. After studying at the Univ. of Cape Town (B.S. physics, 1944, M.S. crystallography, 1945), Cambridge, and Harvard, Cormack became a professor at Tufts Univ. in 1958.
..... Click the link for more information.
, who had independently derived and published the mathematical basis of CAT scanning in 1963–64. Hounsfield was knighted in 1981.