If a surgeon has ever shoved a camera up you, or down you, or indeed sideways into you via the earhole, the person you have to thank for this life-saving indignity is Harold Hopkins, a slum-born communist and one of the greatest medical inventors of the modern age - who is also responsible for close-ups in TV sport.
Hopkins, who died on this date, was born in 1918 in Leicester, the sixth child of a bakery worker. His father was frequently unemployed, and the family was very poor, but Harold’s mother was determined to keep him in school. This proved easier than she might have expected; while he was still at elementary school, one of Harold’s teachers visited his parents to inform them that their son was “a genius.” A scholarship to grammar school, and subsequently to university, followed.
He was good at most subjects, especially on the arts and languages side, but studied physics at university, after which he went to work for a company making optical instruments. It was there that he created, at the request of the BBC, a TV camera which could zoom in and out, from showing a whole field to focusing on one man, instantly. This made television coverage of sport practical for the first time, beginning with the Lord’s Test of 1948.
Hopkins soon left private industry, however, because post-war he was unwilling to work on anything to do with armaments, a stance which he maintained throughout his life. Although he eventually left the Communist Party and switched to Labour, probably to prevent Cold War witch hunts derailing his career, his political opinions, principles and activism don’t seem to have changed notably from his teens to his death.
After war service, marriage, divorce, and marriage, Harold ended up in London working as an academic. He was a very practical sort of boffin, devoted to expanding and deepening the theoretical basis of optics in order to apply those findings to real-world purposes. Precisely this approach led him to become a pioneer of what became CDs and DVDs, but it was his work on fibre optics that has made his memory immortal.
In 1951, Harold Hopkins attended a dinner party. The chap seated next to him turned out to be a gastroenterologist, and there was an obvious conversational overlap between their two specialities: gastroscopy, the use of cameras to look into patients’ stomachs. The trouble is, said the gastro doc, these things are rigid, so you can’t see into all the nooks and crannies. What we could do with is a flexible camera.
So, needless to say, Hopkins spent the next three years inventing exactly that and in 1954 unveiled a prototype of a fibreoptic endoscope, or “fibroscope,” a tubular bundle of thousands of light-transmitting glass fibres. Once it had been commercially developed (abroad, much to Harold’s annoyance) it allowed doctors to see internal areas they had never been able to see before, and with pictures of a clarity previously undreamed of.
Science, of course, is a collective endeavour and there were many steps between then and the technology used now, but his breakthrough was dramatic enough to win Hopkins honours and prizes, fellowships and medals, from scientific bodies around the world. Today, keyhole operations involving endoscopes based on his designs are among the most commonly performed surgical procedures.
Twice nominated for the Nobel, it would be wrong to say that Harold Hopkins is forgotten today, but it’s hard not to feel that he is not as celebrated as he might be. Clearly, his rebel politics played a part in that, as perhaps did the modesty and lack of personal ambition which is mentioned by many who knew him. He was a down to earth man, busy using his unrivalled understanding of the field of lens aberrations to improve life. The full list of his achievements is broad as well as long.
He does have one memorial: the Hopkins Building at the University of Reading, which was officially opened in 2009 by his son, a socialist MP.
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Sources:
https://publishing.rcseng.ac.uk/doi/pdf/10.1308/147363512X13311314195970
https://grahamstevenson.me.uk/2013/03/26/hopkins-harold/
Britain’s communists the untold story by John Green (Artery, 2014)
https://history.rcplondon.ac.uk/inspiring-physicians/harold-horace-hopkins
http://www.haroldhopkins.org/
https://urologichistory.museum/histories/people-in-urology/h/harold-hopkins