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Sir Godfrey Hounsfield invented the computed tomographic scanner, and thus made an incomparable contribution to medicine. An engineer, he conceived the idea of computed tomography during a weekend ramble in 1967. Initially it had nothing to do with medicine but was simply "a realisation that you could determine what was in a box by taking readings at all angles through it."
Back in his workshop at EMI research laboratories in Hayes, Middlesex, he began work on a computerised device that could process hundreds of x ray beams to obtain a two-dimensional display of the soft tissues inside a living organism. By recording on sensors rather than x ray film and taking multiple pictures from a rotating photon source, a series of "slices" could be photographed that showed the different density of tissues. By making a series of such photographs at close intervals, it was then possible to have a three-dimensional image. The mathematics behind this was phenomenal, and other more powerful and better resourced research teams had, unknown to Hounsfield, considered the idea and dismissed it as unworkable.
Soon he was practising on the head of...