There is no doubt that medical imaging ultrasound has it’s origins in the development of naval sonar, used to combat the threat of German submarines in the First World War. The field of acoustics is littered with well known names such as Pierre and Jacques Curie who discovered the piezo-electric effect in 1880. A powerful high frequency ultrasonic echo-sounding device was later developed by eminent French physicist Paul Langévin and Russian scientist Constantin Chilowsky. They called their device the 'hydrophone.’ Between 1915 and 1918 the hydrophone was further improved in classified research activities before being deployed extensively in the surveillance of German U-boats and submarines, and this is where our unsung hero enter the scene.
Robert Boyle - a Canadian physicist trained under Ernest Rutherford at McGill University in Montreal in the developing field of radioactivity. He was later recruited to the University of Alberta in Edmonton to run the physics department. However, after finding the department to be ill equipped to study radioactivity, he turned his attention to acoustics.
Then war broke out and submarine warfare came of age. With the allies loosing hundreds of ships, a great deal of effort was expended to develop submarine detection methods.
The British Admiralty set up a scientific board of experts to concentrate on the war efforts. Ernest Rutherford was a member of the board and he invited Boyle, his ex PhD student to work on the development of sonar, which was actively being investigated by the British, French and Americans. Working closely with Paul Langevin, it turned out that Boyle was the one who actually was the first to produce a working model of sonar in 1917, beating out all the other groups. The innovation did not come soon enough to significantly impact the course of the First World War, but it laid the foundation of modern sonar and eventually the wonders of today’s medical imaging ultrasound.
However, because the development was shrouded in secrecy, Boyle never received the credit for his work, even from within his own university.
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