John Wild (pictured left), an Englishman who spent most of his career in the US, was considered the “father” of the use of ultrasound in medicine, allowing physicians to detect breast and other cancers, study the heart, locate gallstones and let pregnant mothers see their unborn children in the womb for the first time via ultrasonic images. The ultrasound machines you see around the world today are direct descendants of his early crude contraptions, which he and his fellow researcher John Reid called “echographs”. They proved that sonic energy is reflected as echoes from soft biological tissue.