The Short Answer: Godfrey Hounsfield, an engineer at EMI (Electrical and Musical Industries), invented the CT scanner in the early 1970s. EMI's enormous profits from Beatles record sales gave the company the financial freedom to fund his research, which won the Nobel Prize in 1979.

It is one of the most unlikely connections in medical history. The band that gave the world Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper indirectly funded the invention of one of the most important diagnostic tools in modern medicine. The link runs through EMI, a company that was simultaneously a major record label and an electronics research firm.

EMI: Records and Research

EMI had a long history in electronics — the company built radar systems during the Second World War and manufactured television equipment. Its Central Research Laboratories in Hayes, Middlesex, employed engineers and scientists working on a range of projects. One of those engineers was Godfrey Hounsfield.

In the late 1960s, Hounsfield began exploring whether X-ray measurements taken from multiple angles could be combined using a computer to create cross-sectional images of the body. The concept was called computed axial tomography — what we now simply call a CT scan.

The Beatles Connection

Between 1962 and 1970, EMI's music division generated extraordinary profits from Beatles recordings. This financial surplus allowed EMI to continue investing in its Central Research Laboratories even when there was no immediate commercial application for projects like Hounsfield's scanner.

The first clinical CT scan was performed on 1 October 1971 at Atkinson Morley Hospital in London, on a patient with a suspected brain tumour. The scan clearly showed the tumour. Radiology had entered a new era.

Sources

• Hounsfield GN, Computerized transverse axial scanning (tomography), British Journal of Radiology, 1973.
• Nobel Prize Committee, Press Release: The 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.