In 1956, while building an oscillator to record heart sounds,
Wilson Greatbatch inadvertently installed a resistor with the wrong
resistance. It began to pulse at a steady pace—a sound
similar to that made by a properly beating heart.
Listening to the pulse, it dawned on Greatbatch that this
circuit could provide the foundation for a device that could help a
diseased heart stay in rhythm by delivering regular shocks to force
the muscles to contract and pump blood.
Working in the barn behind his home, the UB adjunct professor of
engineering joined what had by then become a global technology
race: the quest to develop the first practical implantable
pacemaker. After painstaking refinements on the pocket-sized
assembly of batteries and transistors, he carried out two years of
experimental work on dogs with Andrew Gage, MD, professor emeritus
of surgery, and the late William Chardack, MD, then chief of
surgery at the Buffalo Veterans Affairs Hospital.
“I seriously doubt if anything I ever do will ever give me
the elation I felt that day when my own two-cubic-inch piece of
electronic design controlled a living heart,” Greatbatch
noted in his diary the first time his pacemaker was implanted in a
dog.
In 1960, the first Greatbatch pacemaker was implanted in a human
patient. Its inventor went on to replace its mercury battery with a
corrosion-free lithium power source of his own invention.
Since then, Greatbatch’s device has improved and saved the
lives of millions of people worldwide. That’s why the
National Society of Professional Engineers named it one of the 10
greatest engineering contributions to society of the last 50
years.
Comment(?)
