Wilson Greatbatch may have died late last month, but the man will not be forgotten. No one will ever forget many of the inventions he created, with the most popular being the pacemaker.
His crucial insight came in 1956 when he was an assistant professor in electrical engineering at Buffalo University. While building a heart rhythm recording device, he mistakenly installed a resistor that was the wrong size and the circuit it produced emitted intermittent electrical pulses. He immediately associated the timing and rhythm of the pulses with a human heartbeat, he wrote in a memoir, The Making of the Pacemaker, published in 2000.
That rekindled lunchtime chats he used to have with researchers about the electrical activity of the heart while working at an animal behaviour laboratory as an undergraduate at Cornell University in 1951.
Greatbatch began experiments to shrink the equipment and shield it from body fluids. On May 7, 1958, doctors in Buffalo demonstrated that a version he had created, of just 32.7 cubic centimetres, could take control of a dog’s heartbeat.
Greatbatch, relying on $US2000 in savings and a large vegetable garden to help feed his growing family, went to work full-time on the device in the barn behind his home in Clarence, New York. His major collaborator was Dr William Chardack, chief of surgery at the hospital where he had first tested the device on dogs. His device was implanted in 10 human patients in 1960, and licensed in 1961 to Medtronic, a company that had developed an external pacemaker. Buoyed by the new implanted devices, Medtronic went on to become the world leader in cardiac stimulation and defibrillation. The American Heart Association says more than half a million pacemakers are now implanted every year.
Photo by Steve Winton