Pacemakers that keep the heart beating normal might have been around two decades before Wilson Greatbatch (1919-2011) got around to working with them. But they were roughly the size of television sets in the early 70s.
So, when people call him the man who ‘invented’ the device that has saved the hearts and lives of millions across the world, no one will bother with specifics like ‘first implantable cardiac pacemaker’.
After being discharged from the American Navy in WWII, Dr Greatbatch was working at the University of Buffalo, when he made a mistake, that has ‘warmed’ hearts ever since. It was in 1956 when he was building a
model heart rhythm recording device, that he absent-mindedly dipped into his tool-box and pulled out an over-sized resistor.
Unknowingly he finished the device and was surprised to find that it produced
intermittent electrical pulses. “That reminded me of how a heart beats,” he recorded in his memoir, published in 2000.
Skeptical as he was, he then delved into the world of pacemakers, by which time teams from around the world were competing to fine-tune their external heart-beaters.
Two years later, he managed to come up with a raw device, some two cubic inches wide – this was put into a dog at the local Veterans hospital in Buffalo, New York and it worked!
Buoyed by its success, Greatbatch quit his job, shacked up in a barn behind his house and is believed to have managed his family’s expenses by selling the produce in their vegetable garden.
Finally in 1960, they managed to successfully implant the ‘internal pulse pacemaker’ into 10 patients that year; none of them died from complications. The next year, medicare manufacturer Medtronic bought the licence and the rest, is history.
Greatbatch made a pile, but chose to siphon the profits into more inventions. His tryst with the pacemaker continued because one of it’s fundamental drawbacks – the mercury-zinc batteries he had used wore out in less than two years and frequent replacement was a pain, literally.
He smartly acquired the rights to a lithium-ion battery design in 1968 (what powers most mobiles these days) and by 1972, produced a prototype pacemaker that would not ‘run out’ for up to a decade.
Looking back at his 92-year-old life, his professors in Buffalo might not have thought of the boy with “rather average” grades, but for millions of folks, he will remain the unknown benefactor. And that is his for posterity.