The record company behind the Beatles also built the first CT scanner
EMI is remembered for Abbey Road and the Beatles, but its laboratories in Hayes produced something very different. In the early 1970s engineer Godfrey Hounsfield developed the first CT scanner there, transforming medical imaging and winning a Nobel Prize in 1979. The same firm had patented stereo sound and helped launch electronic television.
Electric and Musical Industries was formed in March 1931 by merging the Columbia Graphophone Company with the Gramophone Company, owner of the His Master's Voice label. Both reached back to the very beginnings of recorded sound, and the new group made equipment as well as records. That same year it opened its studios at Abbey Road, and one of its engineers, Alan Blumlein, patented stereophonic sound.
The engineering side kept growing. In 1934 a team under Isaac Shoenberg created the fully electronic Marconi-EMI television system, which replaced John Logie Baird's electro-mechanical approach after 1936. Wartime work brought radar and microwave devices; in 1958 Hounsfield's team built the EMIDEC 1100, the first all-transistor computer sold commercially in Britain. The scanner followed, supported by government health funding, though EMI's medical manufacturing was later sold off.
On the music side, EMI's A&R managers included George Martin, who brought in the Beatles, and under chairman Joseph Lockwood from the late 1950s the company became the most successful record firm in the world, with acts from the Beach Boys to Cliff Richard. It had bought Capitol Records in 1957 to break into America. The stairwell at its London headquarters appears on the cover of the Beatles' Please Please Me, and a matching 1969 shot on the same stairs was used for their 1967–1970 compilation.
The later decades were rockier. EMI merged with Thorn in 1979 and split away again in 1996. After a private-equity buyout in 2007 the group piled up around $4 billion of debt, and in 2012 it was broken up, with Universal taking most of the recorded music.
Source: EMI
