Thought you guys would be interested to know since some of us on here owe our lives to this little device. Link is below and full text from article below the link.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/business/wilson-greatbatch-pacemaker-inventor-dies-at-92.html
Wilson Greatbatch, a professed “humble tinkerer” who, working in his barn in 1958, designed the first practical implantable pacemaker, a device that has preserved millions of lives, died on Tuesday at his home in Williamsville, N.Y. He was 92.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Anne Maciariello.
Mr. Greatbatch patented more than 325 inventions, notably a long-life lithium battery used in a wide range of medical implants. He created tools used in AIDS research and a solar-powered canoe, which he took on a 160-mile voyage on the Finger Lakes in New York to celebrate his 72nd birthday.
In later years, he invested time and money in developing fuels from plants and supporting work at the University of Wisconsin in Madison on helium-based fusion reaction for power generation.
He also visited with thousands of schoolchildren to talk about invention, and when his eyesight became too poor for him to read in 2006, he continued to review papers by graduate engineering students on topics that interested him by having his secretary read them aloud.
“I’m beginning to think I may not change the world, but I’m still trying,” Mr. Greatbatch said in a telephone interview in 2007.
He was best known for his pacemaker breakthrough, an example of Pasteur’s observation that “chance favors the prepared mind.”
Mr. Greatbatch’s crucial insight came in 1956, when he was an assistant professor in electrical engineering at the University of Buffalo. While building a heart rhythm recording device for the Chronic Disease Research Institute there, he reached into a box of parts for a resistor to complete the circuitry. The one he pulled out was the wrong size, and when he installed it, the circuit it produced emitted intermittent electrical pulses.
Mr. Greatbatch 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 brought to mind lunchtime chats he had had with researchers about the electrical activity of the heart while he was working at an animal behavior laboratory as an undergraduate at Cornell in 1951.
Back then, he had surmised that electrical stimulation could compensate for breakdowns in the heart’s natural circuitry. But he did not believe the electronic gear of that era could be bundled into a stimulator for continuous use, much less into a device small and reliable enough to implant.
After the unintended circuit rekindled his interest, Mr. Greatbatch began experiments to shrink the equipment and shield it from body fluids. On May 7, 1958, doctors at the Veterans Administration hospital in Buffalo demonstrated that a version he had created, of just two cubic inches, could take control of a dog’s heartbeat.
Mr. Greatbatch soon learned he was in a race with other researchers in the United States and Sweden to perfect a practical implant for humans. Relying on $2,000 in savings and a large vegetable garden to help feed his growing family, he went to work full time on the device in the barn behind his home in Clarence, N.Y. He was assisted by his wife, Eleanor, who administered shock tests for the pacemaker’s transistors by first taping them to a bedroom wall.
His major collaborator was Dr. William C. Chardack, chief of surgery at the hospital where he had first tested the device on dogs. Mr. Greatbatch’s device was implanted in 10 human patients in 1960, including two children. The device was licensed in 1961 to Medtronic, a Minneapolis 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 that more half a million pacemakers are now implanted every year.
Mr. Greatbatch profited handsomely from his invention and invested in other projects. In one, he adapted for human use equipment he had designed to monitor the health of test monkeys launched into space by the government. But he soon returned to address a crucial limitation in his pacemaker: its zinc-mercury batteries, which could drain in as little as two years.
Mr. Greatbatch acquired rights to a lithium iodine design invented in 1968 by researchers in Baltimore, and by 1972 he had re-engineered the device — it had been potentially explosive — into a compact sealed package that could be implanted in the body for a decade or more.
(Page 2 of 2)
A company he founded in 1970 to make the batteries, today called Greatbatch Inc., became a leading power-component supplier for the entire medical device industry and later expanded into related businesses.
Mr. Greatbatch often told students that 9 out of 10 of his ideas failed, either technically or commercially. His last major interest, helium fusion experiments, may be the longest shot of all.
The reaction is theoretically attractive; unlike nuclear power generation, it produces no radioactive materials. But the raw material for it is an isotope of helium that exists only in trace amounts on earth. For the fusion to generate significant amounts of power, the isotope would have to be mined on the moon.
Wilson Greatbatch was born on Sept. 6, 1919, in Buffalo, the only child of Warren Greatbatch, a construction contractor who had immigrated from England, and the former Charlotte Recktenwalt, who worked as a secretary and named him in honor of Woodrow Wilson.
As a teenager, Mr. Greatbatch became fascinated with radio technology. He put his skills to use in the Navy during World War II working on shipboard communications and guidance systems before being assigned to fly combat missions. Mr. Greatbatch, a Presbyterian, cited the seeming randomness of death in wartime as the inspiration for his religious faith.
Returning from the war, Mr. Greatbatch married Eleanor Wright, his childhood sweetheart, and worked for a year as a telephone repairman before entering Cornell.
Nothing in Mr. Greatbatch’s grades foretold success, but that was partly because he was also working at outside jobs to support his family. The jobs kept him abreast of developments in the electronics industry. After earning a master of science degree in electrical engineering at the University of Buffalo, he became manager of the electronics division of the Taber Instrument Corporation in Buffalo.
When Taber was unwilling to take on the risk of his pacemaker implant experiments, he began his life as an independent inventor and entrepreneur.
Eleanor Greatbatch died in January. Besides his daughter, Anne, of Sarasota, Fla., Mr. Greatbatch is survived by three sons, Warren, of Buffalo, Kenneth, of Swanzey, N.H., and John, of Paris, Ky.; 12 grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren. Another son, Peter, died in 1998.
Mr. Greatbatch saw a divine hand in much of what he did. When experiments bore no fruit, he wrote, it was impossible to know whether what looked like failure had not been intended by God as a contribution to success in the future. And he saw invention as an end in itself.
“To ask for a successful experiment, for professional stature, for financial reward or for peer approval,” he wrote in his memoir, “is asking to be paid for what should be an act of love.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/business/wilson-greatbatch-pacemaker-inventor-dies-at-92.html
Wilson Greatbatch, a professed “humble tinkerer” who, working in his barn in 1958, designed the first practical implantable pacemaker, a device that has preserved millions of lives, died on Tuesday at his home in Williamsville, N.Y. He was 92.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Anne Maciariello.
Mr. Greatbatch patented more than 325 inventions, notably a long-life lithium battery used in a wide range of medical implants. He created tools used in AIDS research and a solar-powered canoe, which he took on a 160-mile voyage on the Finger Lakes in New York to celebrate his 72nd birthday.
In later years, he invested time and money in developing fuels from plants and supporting work at the University of Wisconsin in Madison on helium-based fusion reaction for power generation.
He also visited with thousands of schoolchildren to talk about invention, and when his eyesight became too poor for him to read in 2006, he continued to review papers by graduate engineering students on topics that interested him by having his secretary read them aloud.
“I’m beginning to think I may not change the world, but I’m still trying,” Mr. Greatbatch said in a telephone interview in 2007.
He was best known for his pacemaker breakthrough, an example of Pasteur’s observation that “chance favors the prepared mind.”
Mr. Greatbatch’s crucial insight came in 1956, when he was an assistant professor in electrical engineering at the University of Buffalo. While building a heart rhythm recording device for the Chronic Disease Research Institute there, he reached into a box of parts for a resistor to complete the circuitry. The one he pulled out was the wrong size, and when he installed it, the circuit it produced emitted intermittent electrical pulses.
Mr. Greatbatch 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 brought to mind lunchtime chats he had had with researchers about the electrical activity of the heart while he was working at an animal behavior laboratory as an undergraduate at Cornell in 1951.
Back then, he had surmised that electrical stimulation could compensate for breakdowns in the heart’s natural circuitry. But he did not believe the electronic gear of that era could be bundled into a stimulator for continuous use, much less into a device small and reliable enough to implant.
After the unintended circuit rekindled his interest, Mr. Greatbatch began experiments to shrink the equipment and shield it from body fluids. On May 7, 1958, doctors at the Veterans Administration hospital in Buffalo demonstrated that a version he had created, of just two cubic inches, could take control of a dog’s heartbeat.
Mr. Greatbatch soon learned he was in a race with other researchers in the United States and Sweden to perfect a practical implant for humans. Relying on $2,000 in savings and a large vegetable garden to help feed his growing family, he went to work full time on the device in the barn behind his home in Clarence, N.Y. He was assisted by his wife, Eleanor, who administered shock tests for the pacemaker’s transistors by first taping them to a bedroom wall.
His major collaborator was Dr. William C. Chardack, chief of surgery at the hospital where he had first tested the device on dogs. Mr. Greatbatch’s device was implanted in 10 human patients in 1960, including two children. The device was licensed in 1961 to Medtronic, a Minneapolis 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 that more half a million pacemakers are now implanted every year.
Mr. Greatbatch profited handsomely from his invention and invested in other projects. In one, he adapted for human use equipment he had designed to monitor the health of test monkeys launched into space by the government. But he soon returned to address a crucial limitation in his pacemaker: its zinc-mercury batteries, which could drain in as little as two years.
Mr. Greatbatch acquired rights to a lithium iodine design invented in 1968 by researchers in Baltimore, and by 1972 he had re-engineered the device — it had been potentially explosive — into a compact sealed package that could be implanted in the body for a decade or more.
(Page 2 of 2)
A company he founded in 1970 to make the batteries, today called Greatbatch Inc., became a leading power-component supplier for the entire medical device industry and later expanded into related businesses.
Mr. Greatbatch often told students that 9 out of 10 of his ideas failed, either technically or commercially. His last major interest, helium fusion experiments, may be the longest shot of all.
The reaction is theoretically attractive; unlike nuclear power generation, it produces no radioactive materials. But the raw material for it is an isotope of helium that exists only in trace amounts on earth. For the fusion to generate significant amounts of power, the isotope would have to be mined on the moon.
Wilson Greatbatch was born on Sept. 6, 1919, in Buffalo, the only child of Warren Greatbatch, a construction contractor who had immigrated from England, and the former Charlotte Recktenwalt, who worked as a secretary and named him in honor of Woodrow Wilson.
As a teenager, Mr. Greatbatch became fascinated with radio technology. He put his skills to use in the Navy during World War II working on shipboard communications and guidance systems before being assigned to fly combat missions. Mr. Greatbatch, a Presbyterian, cited the seeming randomness of death in wartime as the inspiration for his religious faith.
Returning from the war, Mr. Greatbatch married Eleanor Wright, his childhood sweetheart, and worked for a year as a telephone repairman before entering Cornell.
Nothing in Mr. Greatbatch’s grades foretold success, but that was partly because he was also working at outside jobs to support his family. The jobs kept him abreast of developments in the electronics industry. After earning a master of science degree in electrical engineering at the University of Buffalo, he became manager of the electronics division of the Taber Instrument Corporation in Buffalo.
When Taber was unwilling to take on the risk of his pacemaker implant experiments, he began his life as an independent inventor and entrepreneur.
Eleanor Greatbatch died in January. Besides his daughter, Anne, of Sarasota, Fla., Mr. Greatbatch is survived by three sons, Warren, of Buffalo, Kenneth, of Swanzey, N.H., and John, of Paris, Ky.; 12 grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren. Another son, Peter, died in 1998.
Mr. Greatbatch saw a divine hand in much of what he did. When experiments bore no fruit, he wrote, it was impossible to know whether what looked like failure had not been intended by God as a contribution to success in the future. And he saw invention as an end in itself.
“To ask for a successful experiment, for professional stature, for financial reward or for peer approval,” he wrote in his memoir, “is asking to be paid for what should be an act of love.”
