A short history of ultrasound.
It starts with bats, detours through icebergs and submarines, and ends with you watching your baby yawn.
- 1794 Lazzaro Spallanzani, an Italian priest and scientist, shows that bats find their way in the dark with their ears, not their eyes. Nobody yet knows the sounds involved are too high for people to hear.
- 1880 Brothers Pierre and Jacques Curie discover piezoelectricity: certain crystals produce electricity when squeezed. A year later the reverse is shown too: they vibrate when electricity is applied. It’s still how an ultrasound probe makes sound and hears the echo.
- 1910s After the Titanic sinks in 1912, inventors look for ways to find icebergs with sound. During the First World War, physicist Paul Langevin builds an ultrasound device to detect submarines.
- 1928 Soviet physicist Sergei Sokolov proposes using ultrasound to find hidden flaws in metal. For years, industry uses it more than medicine does.
- 1942 Austrian neurologist Karl Dussik publishes the first attempt to use ultrasound for medical diagnosis, sending sound through the skull to look for brain tumors.
- 1949 George Ludwig, at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Maryland, uses ultrasound echoes to detect gallstones.
- 1950s In Denver, radiologist Douglass Howry builds scanners that draw cross-sections of the body. Early patients have to sit in a tank of water.
- 1958 In Glasgow, obstetrician Ian Donald and his colleagues publish “Investigation of Abdominal Masses by Pulsed Ultrasound” in The Lancet. It’s the start of ultrasound in pregnancy care.
- 1970s Scanners become fast enough to show movement as it happens, and Doppler ultrasound makes it possible to measure blood flow. Ultrasound starts to become a routine part of pregnancy care.
- 1980s Kazunori Baba, at the University of Tokyo, develops three-dimensional ultrasound and captures 3D images of a baby before birth. In 1989 the first commercial 3D machine, the Combison 330, goes on sale.
- Around 2000 Computers get fast enough to redraw a 3D picture many times a second. A 3D picture that moves gets a new name: 4D.
- 2006 We open in Glendale and start offering 4D to families. Read our story.
Curious what it looks like today? See what a 4D session shows at different weeks.