That was the first drawing which I had been commissioned to do, and for which I received an order for £21.

hat we thought we ought to do was to separate out the patient, the doctor, and the machine and try and put these three things in a better ergonomic relationship with one another. I thought it looked like a gun turret and that it was thoroughly inappropriate for pregnant ladies …. Cameron recalled needing to do some serious revision, given the menacing aspect of the prototype:

In 1961, a 23-year-old industrial design graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, Dugald Cameron (who became its director in the 1990s), streamlined the apparatus in what was his first paid design commission after finishing his course of study. Cameron had been recruited to figure out the problem of patient and physician comfort after the University Hospital in Lund, Sweden, placed an order based on an early version of the scanner developed by Donald and his colleagues. However, displacing embodied maternal knowledge in favor of scientific rationalization delivered by external machinery was resisted by some who saw it as part of a larger project of medicalization of pregnancy and birth that usurped a pregnant person’s own intuition. Sonogram technology was taken up widely as machines dropped in price beginning in the 1970s. The transformation of the ultrasound echo into visual information allowed accurate dating of a pregnancy through correlation of fetal size with charts of normative growth trajectories, enabling more precise medical management of the patient and more accurate timing of biochemical tests, such as one made possible by another contemporaneously emerging technology, amniocentesis. The image offered a window into the uterus, with white lines indicating a placenta in formation and, at a nine-week scan, a fetal heartbeat pulsing away at about 140 beats a minute.ĭonald, MacVicar, and Brown’s article “Investigation of Abdominal Masses by Pulsed Ultrasound” was published by the esteemed medical journal The Lancet in 1958 following their years of research. Similarly applied to a pregnant human abdomen, the technology produced a dark oval with crackling shadows. The first Diasonograph, built at Kelvin & Hughes at Hillington, Glasgow, c. A crucial moment in the design’s development occurred in the spring of 1955, when the husband of one of Donald’s patients who worked for a boiler fabrication outfit allowed the doctor to divert the company’s industrial ultrasound technology from its usual deployment-checking for flaws in welds-to test whether it could differentiate between tissue samples (including an ovarian cyst and a juicy steak). Utilizing sound waves with frequencies higher than the upper audible limit of the human ear, and measured in hertz (Hz), ultrasound technology had long been employed in Glasgow’s industrial factories and shipyards. In 1963, they produced the Diasonograph, the world’s first commercial ultrasound scanner. Ian Donald was the Regius Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Glasgow in the 1950s, when he partnered with John MacVicar, an obstetrician at the city’s Western Infirmary, and the industrial engineer Tom Brown to build various obstetric ultrasound scanner prototypes over nearly a decade of collaboration. In this very long list of inventions, one that is little known even by Scots themselves is obstetric ultrasound, developed in the 1950s in Glasgow and now one of the most common medical tools used during pregnancy across the globe. Scotland has given the world myriad designs that have irrevocably shaped modern life, including the telephone, the adhesive postage stamp, the bicycle, penicillin and insulin (Alexander Fleming’s double whammy), and the television.

Early sonogram picture