Wearable Pacemaker
Source: Pacemaker People
With over 350 patents to his name, it’s a wonder that Wilson Greatbatch is not a household name. But of all his innovations, the wearable pacemaker is undoubtedly the most highly acclaimed.
William Greatbatch holding his original creation in his right hand and a 1980s model in his left Source: The New York Times
In 1956, Greatbatch was an electrical engineer working to build a heart rhythm-recording device. In a serendipitous moment of inattention, he reached into a box of spare parts for a resistor, but grabbed the wrong size. Greatbatch realized this after installing it, but he also noticed that the completed circuit produced an electric pulse at a speed of 1.8 times per second.
Pacemakers existed before Greatbatch, but they were the size of TVs, weighed around 100 pounds and could only be used temporarily Source: Brown University
That’s roughly as fast as the heart beats, something Greatbatch immediately picked up on. He realized that the electrical stimuli could be used to assist a weak heart and went to work on shrinking down his device. In 1958 he successfully inserted a pacemaker into a dog, but it was left to a Minneapolis medical company to develop wearable pacemaker for humans that same year.
