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 scan 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 Cormack, who had independently derived and published the mathematical basis of CAT scanning in 1963–64. Hounsfield was knighted in 1981.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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