Godfrey Hounsfield

The periods between my 11th and 18th years remain the most vivid in my memory because this was the time of my first attempts at experimentation, which might never have been made had I lived in the city. I made hazardous investigations of the principles of flight, launching myself from the tops of haystacks with a homemade glider.

Aeroplanes interested me, and at the outbreak of the Second World War, I joined the RAF as a volunteer reservist. I took the opportunity of studying the books which the RAF made available for radio mechanics and looked forward to an interesting course in radio.

The sport would not survive today if drivers were being killed at the rate they were in the 1960s and '70s. It would have been taken off the air. It is beamed into people's living rooms on Sunday afternoons, with children watching.