Our Man, Sir Godfrey

Several years ago, Herb Caen, the late, great San Francisco columnist, asked me, "Bellingham, what is your university experience?"

I was eager to tell him the truth: I went to music school but that was hardly an ardent excursion into scholarship. Between classes, I had to go on my own to San Francisco's City College to get a decent encounter with the German language. I went to New York University's Film School -- for about ten minutes. Not even long enough to complete a short subject. I dropped out to work at a movie house, the Bleecker Street Cinema. At least I could watch movies that way.

"Gee, Herb," I told Caen, "I guess you might say I'm an autodidact."

"Oh, I know what that means, " Caen shot back instantly. "That's when you drive yourself crazy."

Herb was always very quick. When I spent time with him, I often felt like George Fenneman trying to keep up with Groucho Marx. But I did all right.

I always take an interest when I hear successful stories about people who are largely self-taught. But few are as vivid as the biography of Britain's Sir Godfrey Hounsfield who never went to university but was the preeminent leader in computer technology and later developed the CAT scan. He claimed a Nobel Prize for the latter. It goes to show: who needs to do homework? There is more than one way to scan a CAT.

Perhaps a formal education might have gotten in the way of his genius. And just imagine the lives he saved along the way. He just had an understand of mathematics and physiology that defies explanation. He got most of his inspiration while taking long, country walks. This is one part of the Hounsfield psyche that I can understand. If the world took more long walks, we would have a much more serene planet.

Like most great inventors, Hounsfield had unlimited courage. When it was time to put the kosher cow brains aside in the laboratory and turn to human trials, he placed his own head in the device that would later be known as the CAT scan. God knows he risked having his own brains reduced to the intellect of a kosher bovine. Mezuzah done told me.

And he was modest. Hounsfield was uncomfortable with the awards and accolades that he received over the years. He was even invited to join the Royal Society. It was unheard for this long-entrenched scientific community to accept a chap who did not accrue a panoply of academic credentials. But his genius was undeniable. It's unfortunate to note, however, that from time to time his fellow Royal Society members would gleefully and cruelly lock him in the bathroom as a lark. (Yes, I made that up for the hell of it.)

Further proof of his humanity was found in his piano playing. Yes, he taught himself that, too. It's stunning to note what a human being can accomplish with drive and celestially-endowed talent.

One subject, though, seemed to have escaped him: marriage. Perhaps it was too complex for the fellow. It defies formulas, equations and exact dimensions. Not to worry, Sir Godfrey. No one seems to be able to figure that one out. All the same, Sir Godfrey Hounsfield apparently did not need a life partner in order to share a life well-lived with the world.

Bruce Bellingham, San Francisco

From the London Telegraph
Sir Godfrey Hounsfield
(Filed: 17/08/2004)

Sir Godfrey Hounsfield, who died on August 12 aged 84, led the team which developed Britain's first big solid-state computer before inventing the computerised axial tomography (CAT) scanner for use in clinical diagnosis; in recognition of this latter achievement he was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

Hounsfield conceived the idea for a CAT scanner in 1967 during a weekend ramble in the country. 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".

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.

Combining computer and X-ray technology, and practising "on a brain of a cow my colleague got from a kosher house on the other side of London" (he submitted his own head for the first human trials), by 1972 Hounsfield had evolved a machine that could produce detailed images of cross-sections of the brain in four and a half minutes.

Introduced in 1973, early CAT scanners were used to overcome obstacles in the diagnosis of diseases of the brain, and Hounsfield subsequently modified his machine to enable it to scan the whole body.

Unknown to Hounsfield, a South African nuclear physicist, Allan Cormack, had worked on essentially the same problems of CAT, and in a paper published in 1957 had suggested a reconstruction technique called the Radon transform. Although Cormack's work was not widely
circulated, and he and Hounsfield did not collaborate or even meet, in 1979 both men shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the development of computerised tomography.

The invention of the CAT scanner was a remarkable achievement, not least because of the complex algebraic calculations involved in the computer programming. Other research teams with larger resources than EMI had already dismissed such a device as impossible to develop, and one prominent British scientist remarked that Hounsfield's machine used "mathematics I wouldn't pretend to understand now or at any stage of my career".

Yet Hounsfield had never been to university and was largely self-taught.

Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield, the youngest of five children of a farmer near Newark in Nottinghamshire, was born on August 28 1919. At an early age he became intrigued by the farm's mechanical and electrical machinery, and by the age of 11 he had begun to experiment, constructing electrical recording machines and launching himself off the top of haystacks with a home-made glider.

At Magnus Grammar School in Newark, he confessed to responding "only to physics and mathematics with any ease and moderate enthusiasm". But as with so many of Britain's great post-war scientists, his opportunity came with the outbreak of the Second World War.

Hounsfield joined the RAF as a volunteer reservist, hoping to become involved in radio. Having perused some RAF books on radio mechanics, he sat a test and was amazed when he was then taken on as a radar-mechanic instructor and moved to the then RAF-occupied Royal College of Science in South Kensington, and later to Cranwell Radar School.

There, in his spare time, he passed the City and Guilds examination in Radio Communications. In 1945 he was awarded the RAF's Certificate of Merit. His work impressed Air Vice-Marshal J R Cassidy, who was responsible for obtaining a grant for Hounsfield after the war which enabled him to attend Faraday House Electrical Engineering College in London, where he received a diploma.

In 1951 Hounsfield joined the research staff of EMI at Hayes. For a awhile he worked on radar and guided weapons, then ran a small design laboratory, where he soon became fascinated by the emerging field of computers. Starting in about 1958, he led a design team which built the first all-transistor computer to be constructed in Britain, the EMIDEC 1100.

In those days the transistor was a relatively slow device - much slower than valves, which were then used in most computers. However, Hounsfield was able to overcome 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.

When this work finished, Hounsfield transferred to EMI Central Research Laboratories, also at Hayes, where he began his work on CAT scanners. This work, and the development of progressively more sophisticated prototypes of brain and whole body scanners, kept him occupied until 1976.

He remained responsible for long-term thinking about medical systems at EMI's research laboratories while others managed the Research and Development effort supporting his scanners. In his later years with EMI, he broadened his interests into related fields of diagnostic
imaging, such as nuclear magnetic resonance.

After his official retirement in 1986, Hounsfield continued to work as a consultant for EMI, and also to various hospitals, including the National Heart and Chest Hospitals, Chelsea, the National Heart Hospital and the Brompton Hospital.

True to the archetype of the shy, retiring bachelor boffin, Hounsfield found the public interest in his invention "most embarrassing". He won numerous awards and honours (35 in the 1970s alone), among them election to the Royal Society, a rare accolade for someone who did not possess a university degree.

A frugal man, Hounsfield spent very little on himself and always refused EMI's offer to let him take a sabbatical. When presented with the 1972 MacRobert award from the Council of Engineering Institutions, he said he would keep his £25,000 prize in reserve "in case some new
research idea turns up, in which case I can plough it back". He did, however, spend a little of his Nobel prize money on fitting out the living-room of his small semi-detached house in Middlesex with scientific equipment.

Apart from his work, Hounsfield's greatest pleasures were walking in the mountains and leading country rambles. He enjoyed music and played the piano "in a self-taught way". In company, he confessed to enjoying "lively, way-out discussions".

On the day he won the Nobel prize in 1979, Hounsfield had some home-spun words of advice for all would-be Nobel prizewinners: "Don't worry too much if you don't pass exams, so long as you feel you have understood the subject. It's amazing what you can get by the ability to reason things out by conventional methods, getting down to the basics of what is happening."

Godfrey Hounsfield was appointed CBE in 1976 and knighted in 1981. He was elected to a fellowship of the Royal Society in 1975.

He was unmarried.