Allan Cormack, a South African-American physicist, develops during the 1960s, working intermittently and almost as a side interest to his main research, the mathematical foundations needed to reconstruct the three-dimensional internal structure of an object from multiple X-rays taken from different angles. Godfrey Hounsfield, an engineer with no formal university training working at the research laboratories of EMI — the British record company, then flush with profits from the Beatles that indirectly funded the research — is initially unaware of Cormack's theoretical work and independently develops the first functional computed tomography scanner in 1971. Hounsfield's first clinical scanner, installed at Atkinson Morley Hospital in London, takes more than five minutes to perform a single cross-sectional slice of the brain and requires hours of computer processing to reconstruct the image, an enormous limitation compared to modern scanners but revolutionary compared to the conventional two-dimensional X-ray available until then. Computed tomography allows, for the first time, visualization of the internal structure of soft tissues — including brain tumors — without exploratory surgery, radically transforming medical diagnosis and becoming one of the most widely used medical imaging technologies in the world.