Sir Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield was an English electrical engineer who shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Allan MacLeod Cormack for his part in developing the diagnostic technique of X-ray computed tomography.
18 Facts About Godfrey Hounsfield
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Godfrey Hounsfield's name is immortalised in the Hounsfield scale, a quantitative measure of radiodensity used in evaluating CT scans.
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Godfrey Hounsfield was born in Sutton-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, England on 28 August 1919.
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Godfrey Hounsfield was the youngest of five children.
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Godfrey Hounsfield's father, Thomas Hounsfield was a farmer from Beighton, and was linked to the prominent Hounsfield and Newbold families of Hackenthorpe Hall, his mother was Blanche Dilcock.
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Godfrey Hounsfield incorrectly gave this date as 1951 when he wrote his autobiography which is available on the Nobel Prize website.
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Godfrey Hounsfield continued to improve CT scanning, introducing a whole-body scanner in 1975, and was senior researcher to the laboratories.
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Godfrey Hounsfield then set to work constructing a computer that could take input from X-rays at various angles to create an image of the object in "slices".
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At the time, Godfrey Hounsfield was not aware of the work that Cormack had done on the theoretical mathematics for such a device.
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Godfrey Hounsfield built a prototype head scanner and tested it first on a preserved human brain, then on a fresh cow brain from a butcher's shop, and later on himself.
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The principles of computed tomography developed by Godfrey Hounsfield remain in use today.
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Godfrey Hounsfield received numerous awards in addition to the Nobel Prize.
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Godfrey Hounsfield was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1976 and knighted in 1981.
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Godfrey Hounsfield was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1975.
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Godfrey Hounsfield was awarded the Howard N Potts Medal in 1977.
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Godfrey Hounsfield had resolved to develop what came to be CT scanning while on a country ramble.
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Godfrey Hounsfield retired from EMI in 1986 and used the prize money from his Nobel to build a personal laboratory in his home.
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Godfrey Hounsfield died at Kingston upon Thames, Greater London, in 2004, at the age of 84.