Ultrasound image by mylissa, CC-BY-SA

Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the publication in The Lancet of the first scholarly article on medical ultrasound by the obstetricians Ian Donald and John MacVicar, and the engineer Tom Brown. While earlier groups had experimented with ultrasound, it was Donald and Brown who achieved real diagnostic success with it, and popularised it in the medical profession. They initially applied it to distinguish uterine cysts from solid tumours such as fibroids, and later developed it for other important tasks, such as diagnosing placenta praevia (a potentially lethal condition during pregnancy in which the placenta attaches too low down in the womb) and directly observing foetuses. It is thanks to their work that ultrasound has become routine in pregnancy and many peoples' first view of their children. 

Donald had become interested in the potential of ultrasound for medicine thanks to his experience with both radar and sonar while serving in the RAF during World War II. Much of his success was because he happened to work for the University of Glasgow, in a city with a large-scale shipbuilding industry which used ultrasonic techniques to test for flaws in metal parts. It was also the home of Kelvin and Hughes, one of the main manufacturers of ultrasonic testing equipment, for which company Brown worked.

There was also a particular perceived need at the time for a safer method of examining foetuses in the womb, as epidemiological studies had discovered that X-ray examinations during pregnancy led to a higher risk of leukaemia and other cancers in the early lives of the children.

Donald subsequently became a celebrity not just for his scientific and medical skills, but as a prominent medical campaigner against abortion. He frequently stated that his observations of foetuses in the womb had confirmed him in his belief that they qualified as human beings from conception, although unlike some religious pro-life campaigners he morally accepted abortion when the foetus was clearly unlikely to survive childbirth or where the child would be very severely disabled. Brown's career effectively ended with the failure of an attempt to start a business producing medical ultrasound equipment, and he felt later in life that much of the media neglected his vital technological contributions to the development of the idea, although Donald always acknowledged them in public.

Further reading:

Brown, T G. Personal recollections. 1999. Available free online at http://www.ob-ultrasound.net/brown-on-ultrasound.html
Craig, M. Craig's Essentials of Sonography and patient care, Baltimore: Saunders, 2018. Available as an ebook in the British Library reading rooms.
Donald, I, MacVicar, J, and Brown, T G. Investigation of abdominal masses by pulsed ultrasound, The Lancet, 1958, 271(7032), pp. 1188-1195. Available at (P) GP 00 - E(14) and also electronically in the British Library reading rooms.
Nicholson, M and Fleming, J E E. Imaging and imagining the foetus. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Available at YK.2014.a.7586.
Norton, M E. Callen's Ultrasonography in obstetrics and gynecology, Elsevier, 2016. Available as an ebook in the British Library reading rooms.

Today on World Baking Day, we'll look at two milestones in how bread-baking became an industry in Britain.

The first is Dr. John Dauglish's invention of the "aerated bread" process. This mechanical process did not use yeast to raise the bread, but added high-pressure carbon dioxide to the water used to make it. Dauglish argued that this reduced production time and the labour required, made the raising of the bread more controllable, and allowed an end to hand-kneading, which he considered unhygienic. It also allowed bread to be made more easily from wholemeal flour, which even then was seen as more nutritious. Dauglish patented his process in a series of patents between 1856 and 1865, GB2293/1856, GB2224/1867, GB677/1864, GB3184/1864, and GB1346/1865.

As well as his bread process, Dauglish's company, the Aerated Bread Co., or ABC, became a major tea shop chain in Britain and its colonies. The ABC shops turn up repeatedly in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century literature. Sometimes they were criticised as corporate and industrial, rather like Starbucks nowadays (for example in T S Eliot's poem "A Cooking Egg"), but they were also considered important to women's liberation, as they did not serve alcohol and were considered a safe place for "respectable" women to socialise without risking their reputation or being subject to male sexual aggression.

Both the baking and catering businesses of ABC disappeared during the early 1980s. The site of the company's main bakery on Camden Street in North London is now occupied by a large supermarket, of interest as a well-known work by the "high-tech" architect Nicholas Grimshaw.

The second major change in industrial baking was the introduction of the so-called "Chorleywood" process, named after the location of the Flour Milling and Baking Research Association in Hertfordshire. This was based on high-speed mixing and the use of flour improvers such as potassium bromate (now banned for use in food) and Vitamin C. It greatly increased the speed of bread-making and allowed bread to be made from low-protein wheat flour that had previously been considered unsuitable for bread-making. Chorleywood bread is the typical supermarket sandwich loaf, soft and long-lasting with even small bubbles in the crumb.

However, the process has been heavily criticised by some traditional bakers, who blame Chorleywood bread for the increased level of coeliac disease and milder gluten intolerance in Britain in recent years. It has been argued that slower fermentation by more traditional yeast and bacterial cultures reduces the quantity of the specific gluten proteins that cause intolerance, and fermentable carbohydrates that may contribute to other bowel problems, although this remains unproven.

Further reading:
Cauvain, C P and Young, L S, The Chorleywood bread process. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2006. Available at m06/27984.
Costabile, A, et al., Effect of breadmaking process on in vitro gut microbiota parameters in irritable bowel syndrome, PLoS One. 2014, 9(10), e111225. Available free online at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0111225
Edwards, W P (Ed.), The science of bakery products. Cambridge: Royal Society of Chemistry, 2015. Available as a legal deposit e-book in British Library Reading Rooms.
Richardson, B W, On the healthy manufacture of bread: a memoir on the system of Dr. Dauglish. London:Bailliere & Co., 1884
Shaw, G, Curth, L H, and Alexander, A, Creating new spaces of food consumption: the rise of mass catering and the activities of the Aerated Bread Company, in Benson J and Ugolini, L, Ed. Cultures of selling: perspectives on consumption and society since 1700, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, pp.81-100. Available at YC. 2006.a.13499
Weichselbaum, E, Does bread cause bloating?, Nutrition Bulletin, 2012, 37, pp.30-36. Available at (P) HP 30-E(2), and online in British Library reading rooms.

Posted by Philip Eagle. Image from "Modern London" by Richard Phillips, 1804.

The most recent GREATforImagination post covered an augmented reality app created by Nexus Studios for the US Presidential administration in 2016. Augmented reality is a halfway point towards the more famous virtual reality, in which CGI elements are added to a real-time image of the user's surroundings, using either a mobile device screen or virtual reality goggles. The most well-known applications at the moment are for entertainment, such as the famous game Pokemon Go, or our own use of it in our Harry Potter exhibition.

 

However, there are some more practical uses for augmented reality in the worlds of science and engineering.

The construction industry still largely uses 2-D documents to indicate what should be built. However, why not create augmented reality images of objects in situ for people to copy? Or why not help utilities workers "see" underground pipes before they start digging holes?

An obvious application is in the world of chemistry, where physical 3-D models of large molecules have been familiar for decades, but can take a long time to build. Digital models can be created much more quickly, and AR equipment allows scientists to interact with them with increasing realism. There's a freeware program to try it yourself, if you have some chemistry and computing knowledge.

AR can also be used in surgery, either for training purposes or to allow surgeons to "see" what they are doing during minimally invasive surgery.

(All the articles linked are open access, so you don't have to come to the Library to read them)