The determination of the elastic constants of unidirectional carbon fibre composite via immersion based ultrasound is an established area with much literature. Existing literature reviews in this area discuss the extant literature but do not offer a deep review of the seminal publications during this period, but instead focus on reporting the contributions of the published literature. Thus, a gap in knowledge exists for a comprehensive literature review charting the evolution of how the elastic constants of uni-directional carbon fibre composite are determined via immersion based ultrasonic through transmission. This work addresses this. Building on previous literature, this paper reviews seminal publications in chronological order, with the benefits, drawbacks and contributions to knowledge of each reviewed publication identified within this work. This review is bounded from 1970 to 2015, (some 45 years of literature), and maps the progression of technological and scientific advancement of the through transmission technique; that is, seminal literature during this period is both identified and reviewed in chronological order thus demonstrating how each paper builds on previous work. This paper also documents two novel information tables, which for the first time allow the significant contributions to knowledge during this period to be quickly identified.