The Beatles' record sales helped fund the invention of the CT scanner.

During the 1960s, Electric and Musical Industries (EMI) enjoyed unprecedented financial success thanks to the global phenomenon of The Beatles. Between 1962 and 1970, the band sold hundreds of millions of records, providing EMI with a massive surplus of capital. The company decided to reinvest these profits into its Central Research Laboratories to explore diverse technological fields.Sir Godfrey Hounsfield, an electrical engineer at EMI, used this funding to pursue his interest in pattern recognition and reconstruction. In 1967, he proposed a method to create a three-dimensional image of an object by taking multiple X-ray measurements from different angles. This concept eventually led to the development of the first commercial CT scanner, known as the EMI-scanner.The first prototype was built in 1968 and required nine days to scan a single object and over two hours for a computer to process the data. By 1971, the technology was ready for clinical use, and the first brain scan on a human patient was performed at Atkinson Morley Hospital in London. This breakthrough allowed doctors to see inside the human body without invasive surgery for the first time.For his revolutionary invention, Godfrey Hounsfield shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Allan Cormack. While EMI eventually exited the medical imaging market in the 1980s, the initial development of this life-saving technology remains a direct legacy of the 'Beatlemania' era. Today, CT scans are a fundamental tool in modern medicine, with millions performed annually worldwide.