Sir Godfrey Hounsfield 1919 - 2004

The name of Sir Godfrey Hounsfield may not be familiar to the readers of Bits and Bytes or to those who did not come from an EMI background in computers.

However anybody and that includes me, who has had the benefit of diagnosis using CAT (computerised axial tomography) techniques owes a debt to Sir Godfrey.

Sir Godfrey Hounsfield who died aged 84 on August 12th 2004 led the team at EMI which developed Britain’s first big solid-state computer before going on to invent the CAT scanner.
In recognition of this latter achievement he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

Hounsfield conceived the idea for a CAT scanner on a weekend ramble in the country and on his return to EMI’s research laboratories at Hayes in Middlesex, he began working on a device that could process hundreds of X-ray beams to obtain a three –dimensional display of the inside of a living organism. Hounsfield submitted his own head for the first human trials!

Hounsfield came from a farming background in Nottinghamshire.At an early stage he became intrigued by the farms’s mechanical and electrical machinery and by the age of 11 he had begun to experiment, constructing electrical recording machines.

With the outbreak of war Hounsfield joined the RAF as a volunteer reservist becoming a radar-mechanic instructor at Cranwell Radar School.

In 1951 he joined the research staff of EMI at Hayes working on radar and guided weapons but increasingly became interested in the emerging field of computers.

Starting in about 1958 he led a design team which built the first all-transistor solid state computer to be constructed in Britain the EMIDEC 1100.

In those days the transistor was a relatively slow device. Hounsfield overcame this problem by driving the transistor with a magnetic core. This increased the speed of the machine so that it compared with that of valve computers and brought about the use of transistors in computing earlier than had been anticipated.

The EMIDEC 1100/1101 range of computers became very successful products being purchased by some of the major companies in Britain. Amongst them were J.Sainsbury, Barclays Bank, London Transport, Smith Industries, Domestic Electric Rentals, Thorn Industries, Ministry of Labour, Royal Naval Stores, Glaxo, Kodak, Central Civilian Pay and Records.

These were exciting times in the embryonic world of commercial computing although we did not always appreciate that at the time when endeavouring to repair Sainsbury’s computers so that the vans could be loaded up during the night for shop deliveries or get the Creed 3000 punches going at Barclays Bank
More of that some other time.

Incidentally EMI produced another successful range of computers the EMIDEC 2400 used by amongst others MPNI at Newcastle.
On a personal note, when I joined EMI as a student apprentice in September 1955 I had the good fortune to work in the radar and guided weapons development laboratories under the tutelage of the then Mr.Hounsfield and found him to be a very kind and helpful person as well as a great engineer. An abiding memory will always be seeing Mr.Hounsfield (no first names then for your elders and betters!) driving into the car park at Hayes in his scruffy dark green, mud spattered swept back bodied Standard Vanguard. It never seemed to get cleaned!

Sir Godfrey Hounsfield a great man and engineer, who has left a lasting legacy for which millions must be thankful.


T.J. (Dick)Richards