Godfrey Hounsfield

Sir Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield was an English electrical engineer, born on 28 August 1919 in Sutton-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, the youngest of five children of a farming family. As a child he tinkered with electrical recording machines and gadgets on his parents farm. Shortly before the Second World War he joined the Royal Air Force as a volunteer reservist and learned the basics of electronics and radar, and afterwards he attended Faraday House Electrical Engineering College in London. In 1949 he began work at EMI in Hayes, Middlesex, where he researched guided weapon systems and radar before turning to imaging. He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Allan MacLeod Cormack for his part in developing X-ray computed tomography, and the Hounsfield scale of radiodensity, measured in Hounsfield units, carries his name. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1975.