Know how Wilson Greatbatch invented the implantable cardiac pacemaker
Learn about Wilson Greatbatch and his invention of an implantable cardiac pacemaker.
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Transcript
Inventor Wilson Greatbatch had a great passion for electronics and for his wife, Eleanor, who was his assistant. To help people with irregular or fast heartbeats, he was making a machine to record the sound of a human heart. One day, something went wrong, and he added in a resistor of the wrong size. Instead of recording, the machine started to give out an irregular pulse using almost no battery power at all.
Rather than pursuing his mission to build a recorder, Greatbatch thought about what he'd done and realized that if his machine produced a regular pulse with very little power and if he could just make it small enough, he would have found a really clever way to stimulate a failing human heart. Initially, the reaction of doctors to the idea of an implantable heart stimulator was skeptical, to say the least.
But he eventually found a way to convince them with the help of an obliging dog. He spent many years perfecting his invention until, with the help of his dog, he won over the medical profession. It began to prolong the lives of hundreds and thousands of patients. Greatbatch lived happily with his wife into old age. And today, his accidental invention, the pacemaker, is implanted in more than 600,000 new human hearts every year.
Rather than pursuing his mission to build a recorder, Greatbatch thought about what he'd done and realized that if his machine produced a regular pulse with very little power and if he could just make it small enough, he would have found a really clever way to stimulate a failing human heart. Initially, the reaction of doctors to the idea of an implantable heart stimulator was skeptical, to say the least.
But he eventually found a way to convince them with the help of an obliging dog. He spent many years perfecting his invention until, with the help of his dog, he won over the medical profession. It began to prolong the lives of hundreds and thousands of patients. Greatbatch lived happily with his wife into old age. And today, his accidental invention, the pacemaker, is implanted in more than 600,000 new human hearts every year.