Tom Brown (engineer)

Thomas Graham Brown (10 April 1933 in Glasgow – 13 December 2019) was a Scottish engineer who was most notable for collaborating in the design of the first medical ultrasound machine along with the obstetrician and designer Ian Donald, a physician at the University of Glasgow and industrial designer and obstetrician John MacVicar.

In 1944, Brown enrolled at Allan Glen's School in Glasgow.

In April 1951, after completing school and making an exploratory visit to the company to meet the chief engineer, he joined Kelvin & Hughes Ltd at the time a Glasgow manufacturer of scientific instruments as a technical apprentice.

Two years into his five year apprenticeship, he started working for Alex Rankin and to specialise in non-destructive testing.

In 1956 Brown was promoted to research and development engineer at Kelvin & Hughes Ltd.

It was in late 1956 when Brown first met Ian Donald.

Brown, although relatively young at twenty-three, had previously worked on an automatic flaw detector for testing of industrial products.

It was while working in the Western Infirmary installing a bulb in an operating theatre that Brown found out that Donald was experimenting with the flaw detector.

Brown immediately looked up Donald in the Infirmary directory, phoned him and arranged a meeting.

When they met, Brown noticed that the Mark IIb was not manufactured by Kelvin & Hughes but instead had been manufactured under contract.

He also noticed that the machine had been converted from using a double probe, one to produce pulses and one to receive the pulses, to a single probe.

Not wanting to insult Donald by explaining why the machine was not working correctly, Brown offered to try and source another machine from somewhere.

Brown phoned Alex Rankin, the man who collaborated with Brown on the automatic flaw detector, for help.

Rankin offered to gift the latest Mk IV Flaw Detector which was subsequently forwarded to Glasgow Central station from the Barkingside Labs location of Kelvin & Hughes, for delivery to Brown.

Brown approached deputy chairman Bill Slater who sent Brown to see Bill Halliday, the company's chief research scientist for an opinion on building the machine.

After Brown delivered his spiel to Halliday it was several months before Brown received a reply in the form of a memo which stated that £500 had been allocated by Smiths for the development and that Brown was able to spend half a day per week working with Donald.

The new B-mode scanner was also known by the name Bed-Table Scanner and was built out of an amalgamation of medical and industrial parts.

Brown managed to scrounge an older Mark IV flaw detector in Glasgow along with a 6-inch electrostatically-deflected Cathode-ray tube taken from the company stores in Glasgow.

From the companies Barkingside R&D department, Brown found an experimental weld-testing machine.

Both these machines were cannibalised for parts.

To measure the position of the transducer, Brown selected an 'X-Y' orthogonal measuring frame system.

This was measured in place by a sine/cosine potentiometer that was used to calculate the position of the transducer from the angle of its rotations.

This was an exceedingly expensive piece of electronic equipment and was more than their £500 budget.

However, Brown managed to scrounge a damaged component and repair it.

The machine was built on top an old hospital bed and made extensive use of Meccano chains and sprockets.

By late 1957 the first contact B-mode scanner was constructed and in clinical use by that year.

The design was patented by Kelvin & Hughes in 1957 with Brown being named the inventor with commercial rights assigned to the company.

In a landmark paper in June 1958, published by Donald, McVicar and Brown in The Lancet, they discussed the development of the A-mode scanner and decisions that led up to the B-mode scanner.

Although the images described in the paper were very crude, they were the first successful application of obstetric ultrasound.

In 1961 Kelvin Hughes merged with Smiths Industries.

In 1963, Brown became director of the medical ultrasonics department in Glasgow after Alex Rankin died.

In 1964 the Glasgow operation of Kelvin Hughes was the subject of a takeover bid by the aviation division of Smiths Industries.

In 1965, Brown was appointed to a post of chief engineer at Honeywell with a move to Hemel Hempstead.

At Honeywell he worked on the design of open-heart surgery and coronary care machines, as well as prefabricated operating theatres.

with the factory at Hillington being eventually closed in 1966, when Smiths pulled out of Scotland.

The design the group created was gradually evolved by them before it was transferred to Smith Industrials of England where it was improved by Brown, to become a commercial product known as the Diasonograph.

In 1967, Brown left Honeywell to work at Nuclear Enterprises in Edinburgh, the business that bought the medical ultrasound unit from Kelvin & Hughes in 1966.

As Nuclear Enterprises did not buy the patent rights for the ultrasound machine designs, they instead went to a firm in the United States.

So to get around his own patents, Brown decided to develop a 3-D ultrasound machine and to formally study the problem.

In 1970 Brown became a research fellow to study medical physics and three-dimensional imaging at the University of Edinburgh.