As several animal species use, and seemingly have always used, ultrasound the history of ultrasound in effect pre dates written history.
Ultrasound is a branch of acoustics (the science of sound) dating back to Pythagoras in the 6th century BC. Ultrasound as echolocation in bats was discovered by Lazzaro Spallanzani in 1794, when he demonstrated that bats hunted and navigated by inaudible sound, not vision.
The piezoelectric effect, discovered by Jacques and Pierre Curie in 1880, was useful in transducers to generate and detect ultrasonic waves in air and water.
The first practical application of ultrasound could be attributed to Francis Galton in 1893 who invented the Galton whistle, an adjustable whistle that produced ultrasound, which he used to measure the hearing range of humans and other animals, demonstrating that many animals could hear sounds above the hearing range of humans. These simple whistles are still used today.
As a more practical application Paul Langevin in 1917 used ultrasound to detect submarines.
The ‘potential’ for ultrasonic imaging of objects, was recognized by Sokolov in 1939, but techniques at that time produced relatively low-contrast images.
In 1940 Floyd Firestone devised the first ultrasonic echo imaging device, the Supersonic Reflectoscope, to detect internal flaws in metal castings.
The first images in the human body are thought to be from around the same time in 1941, Karl Theo Dussik and his brother Friedreich used ultrasound to echo image the ventricles of a human brain.
Ultrasound for diagnostic purposes was used by Dr George Ludwig in the late 1940s he reported on the presence of gall stones.
John Wild used ultrasound to assess the thickness of bowel tissue as early as 1949; he has been described as the “father of medical ultrasound”.
In 1961 David Robinson and George Kossoff’s work at the Australian Department of Health resulted in the first commercially practical water path ultrasonic scanner.
Then in 1963 Meyerdirk & Wright launched production of the first commercial hand-held articulated arm compound contact B-mode scanner, which made ultrasound generally available for medical use.
Ian Donald together with the medical physicist Tom Brown and fellow obstetrician Dr John MacVicar, looked at pathologies with ultrasound. These findings were reported in The Lancet on 7 June 1958 as “Investigation of Abdominal Masses by Pulsed Ultrasound” – possibly one of the most important papers ever published in the field of diagnostic medical imaging. These findings led to the modern field of ultrasound scanning in pregnancy.
In the 1950’s the Fry Brothers (William and Francis) were investigating the potiential uses of ultrasound for therapy (specifically high intensity ultrasound). As part of their research they had to understand in detail how ultrasound propagated in biological media. Their investigations thus addressed such issues as the speed of propagation, how ultrasound is scattered and attenuated, and the degree to which tissue can tolerate ultrasound. They developed phenomenological theories based on their data and even began to study nonlinear acoustic effects (O’Brien 2015). The work by the Fry brothers is accredited as demonstrating what levels of ultrasound are destructive and what levels are safe for diagnosis and treatment.
Early applications of ultrasound for treatment involved tissue heating (Lehmann, 1953). Over the following decades, scientific advances allowed improved methods for effective treatment of Meniere’s disease by destruction of the vestibular nerve, and of Parkinson’s disease using focused ultrasound for localized tissue destruction in the brain (Fry et al. 1954; Newell, 1963).
By the 1970’s, the use of therapeutic ultrasound was established for physiotherapy (Miller, Douglas L et al. 2012), and research continued on more difficult applications in neurosurgery (Wells, 1977), and for cancer treatment (Kremkau, 1979).
Today ultrasound is used for diagnosis, treatment and destruction in different applications all just in medicine.