The first sonograms performed for pregnancy took place in Glasgow, Scotland, in the late 1950s, when obstetrician Ian Donald and engineer Tom Brown adapted industrial ultrasound equipment to look inside the womb — work published in the medical journal The Lancet in 1958. Before that, pregnancy was monitored by hand and stethoscope alone; within a generation, ultrasound became one of the most routine tools in prenatal care. Updated 2026, this guide traces the full story, from a 1942 brain experiment to the 3D and 4D scans used today.
Who Invented the First Sonogram?
The story of the sonogram begins not in a maternity ward but in neurology. In 1942, Austrian neurologist Karl Dussik coined the term "hyperphonography" for his attempt to use ultrasound waves to image the human brain. Dussik transmitted ultrasound through the skull and recorded the echoes on photographic paper, producing the first ultrasound images of any part of the human body. His brain images were crude and never became clinically useful, but they proved a crucial principle: sound waves above the range of human hearing could pass through tissue and return information about what lay inside.
Ultrasound itself was not new in 1942. The technology grew out of sonar developed during the First World War, and by the 1930s it was used to detect flaws in metal. Dussik's contribution was to point it at the human body. Over the following decade, researchers in the United States and Europe experimented with ultrasound for detecting gallstones, breast tumours, and heart disease — but nobody had yet aimed it at a pregnant uterus.
Ian Donald and the First Pregnancy Scans in Glasgow
The breakthrough for pregnancy came in Glasgow in the mid-1950s. Ian Donald, Regius Professor of Midwifery at the University of Glasgow, had been struck by the difficulty of diagnosing abdominal and pelvic masses: surgeons often operated only to find a harmless cyst or a pregnancy they had not expected. In 1955, Donald met Tom Brown, a young engineer at the Kelvin & Hughes company, which made industrial ultrasound flaw detectors for shipyards. Together, they began adapting a metal flaw detector to scan patients.
Their early experiments were improvised. The first machine, built around a Kelvin & Hughes Mark IV flaw detector, produced one-dimensional A-mode traces — spikes on a screen that showed the distance to a boundary inside the body. By 1957, Donald, Brown, and fellow physician John MacVicar had built a bed-scanning machine that moved a probe across the abdomen and produced two-dimensional B-mode images: cross-sectional pictures, grainy but recognizably anatomical.
In 1958, Donald, MacVicar, and Brown published their landmark paper, "Investigation of abdominal masses by pulsed ultrasound," in The Lancet. The paper included some of the first published ultrasound images of a pregnant uterus, demonstrating that ultrasound could distinguish a pregnancy from an ovarian cyst and could measure the size of the fetus. That 1958 paper is widely regarded as the founding publication of obstetric ultrasound, and the first sonograms performed for pregnancy date to the Glasgow experiments of 1956 to 1958 that produced it.
How Early Ultrasound Machines Worked
Early obstetric ultrasound worked on the pulse-echo principle that still underlies every scan today. A transducer sent short pulses of sound at frequencies of about 1 to 2.5 megahertz — far above human hearing — into the abdomen. When the sound hit a boundary between tissues of different density, such as fluid and soft tissue, part of it echoed back. The machine measured the time each echo took to return and converted it into a distance, building up a picture line by line.
The first clinical machines were bulky and slow. Patients lay on a bed while the operator moved the probe by hand over the abdomen, which was coated in olive oil as a coupling medium. A single image could take minutes to build, and the patient had to have a full bladder, because urine provided an acoustic window through which sound travelled more easily to the uterus. Image quality was poor by modern standards, but it was revolutionary: for the first time, doctors could see a pregnancy without surgery.
The 1960s and 1970s: Real-Time Scanning Arrives
The 1960s brought steady refinement. In 1963, American researchers produced the first images of a fetus in the womb that were detailed enough to measure the fetal head, and by the late 1960s, ultrasound was being used to detect multiple pregnancies, locate the placenta, and estimate gestational age from the size of the fetal head. The biparietal diameter — the width of the fetal skull — became the standard dating measurement, accurate to within about 7 to 10 days in the first trimester.
The decisive leap came in the 1970s with real-time scanning. Instead of building one static image over minutes, new machines produced moving pictures at 15 to 30 frames per second, letting clinicians watch the fetal heartbeat and fetal movements live. The first commercial real-time scanners appeared in the mid-1970s, and by the end of the decade they had largely replaced static scanners in obstetric practice. Real-time imaging also made it possible to guide procedures such as amniocentesis, which is usually performed between 15 and 20 weeks of pregnancy, with the needle watched on screen throughout.
The 1980s: Transvaginal Ultrasound and Doppler
The 1980s added two technologies that remain standard today. Transvaginal ultrasound, introduced into clinical practice in the mid-1980s, placed a smaller probe inside the vagina, much closer to the uterus. Because the sound travelled a shorter distance, it produced sharper images in early pregnancy and could detect a gestational sac as early as 4 to 5 weeks — about a week earlier than abdominal scanning — and confirm a fetal heartbeat from around 6 weeks.
Doppler ultrasound, adapted from the radar principle discovered by Christian Doppler in 1842, measured the speed and direction of blood flow. In obstetrics, Doppler studies of the umbilical artery, introduced in the late 1980s, let clinicians assess how well the placenta was functioning: abnormal blood flow patterns could signal fetal growth restriction weeks before it showed up in size measurements. Together, transvaginal and Doppler techniques turned ultrasound from a dating tool into a diagnostic instrument.
If you are curious about the other monitoring tests used in pregnancy, our guide to the non-stress test in pregnancy explains how fetal heart rate monitoring works in the third trimester.
The 1990s to Today: 3D and 4D Ultrasound
Three-dimensional ultrasound arrived in clinical use in the 1990s. By combining many two-dimensional slices, 3D machines reconstructed a volume image of the fetus, showing the face and surface features in striking detail. 4D ultrasound — 3D imaging in real time, so parents could watch the baby move, yawn, and suck its thumb — followed in the early 2000s. These improved detection of facial and spinal abnormalities, but the standard diagnostic scan remains two-dimensional, since 2D images are sharper for measuring organs and bones.
The 2010s and 2020s brought further refinements rather than revolutions: higher-frequency probes with finer resolution, portable handheld scanners that connect to a phone, and artificial-intelligence tools that help measure fetal structures automatically. The physics, however, is unchanged since Glasgow: pulses of sound, echoes, and time converted into distance.
When Did Routine Pregnancy Ultrasound Become Standard?
Routine ultrasound became standard care gradually, country by country, rather than on a single date. In the United Kingdom, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) now recommend two routine scans: a dating scan between 11 and 14 weeks, and an anomaly scan — often called the anatomy scan — between 18 and 22 weeks. The 18- to 22-week anatomy scan checks the baby's organs, measures growth, and screens for structural differences; it is the scan most parents think of as "the big one."
In the United States, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) similarly recommends at least one ultrasound examination during pregnancy, typically the anatomy scan at 18 to 22 weeks, with earlier scans offered for dating when the last menstrual period is uncertain. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommended in its 2016 antenatal care guidelines that every pregnant person receive at least one ultrasound scan before 24 weeks of gestation, a recommendation aimed especially at countries where ultrasound was still uncommon. By the 1990s, routine scanning was already standard in most high-income countries; the WHO recommendation extended that standard globally.
How Many Ultrasounds Are Typical Today?
For a low-risk pregnancy in the United States or United Kingdom, two scans are typical: the dating scan and the anatomy scan. Many people receive one or two additional scans — for example, a third-trimester growth scan at 32 to 36 weeks if there are concerns about the baby's size, or extra monitoring for twins, where scans are typically offered every 4 weeks from 20 weeks onward. High-risk pregnancies, including those with gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, or a history of stillbirth, may involve scans every 2 to 4 weeks throughout the second half of pregnancy.
The exact number varies by country, clinician, and individual circumstances, and more scans are not automatically better: professional guidelines caution against non-medical "keepsake" scans that prolong ultrasound exposure without clinical benefit. For a fuller breakdown of what is typical and when extra scans are offered, read our guide on how many ultrasounds during pregnancy. You can also follow what each scan typically checks in our pregnancy symptoms week by week guide.
It is also worth knowing that ultrasound results can raise questions that need careful interpretation. A scan that finds an empty gestational sac, for example, is not always bad news in very early pregnancy — and a wrong positive pregnancy test is a separate issue from anything a scan shows. When results are unclear, your clinician will usually repeat the scan after 7 to 14 days rather than making a decision from a single image.
The Bottom Line on the First Sonograms for Pregnancy
The first sonograms for pregnancy were performed in Glasgow between 1956 and 1958, when Ian Donald, Tom Brown, and John MacVicar adapted an industrial flaw detector into the first obstetric ultrasound machine and published their results in The Lancet in 1958. From Karl Dussik's 1942 hyperphonography experiments, through real-time scanning in the 1970s, transvaginal and Doppler techniques in the 1980s, and 3D and 4D imaging from the 1990s onward, ultrasound grew from an improvised experiment into the standard of prenatal care — with the 18- to 22-week anatomy scan now routine worldwide.
If you are expecting and want to check the timing of your own scans, our ultrasound due date calculator can estimate your due date from an ultrasound measurement, and our pregnancy week by week guide walks through what happens — and what is usually checked — in every week of pregnancy.