Wilson Greatbatch (1919–2011)
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Wilson Greatbatch trained as an electrical engineer at Cornell and Buffalo Universities. While building an oscillator to record heart sounds, he made a fortuitous discovery when he grabbed the wrong resistor to plug into the circuit he was making. The circuit pulsed for 1.8 ms, stopped for 1 s and the sequence was then repeated. Greatbatch later described the incident in his 2000 book as the realization that this electronic sequence could drive a heart [1]. On May 7, 1958, Greatbatch brought an implantable pacemaker built with two transistors to William Chardack at the Buffalo Veterans’ Hospital. Chardack exposed the heart of a dog and two pacemaker wires were applied. The pacemaker worked for 4 h. Greatbatch then proceeded to make 50 pacemakers by hand. The first successful implantation took place in April 1960 by Chardack at the Buffalo Veterans’ Hospital after extensive animal testing [2] (Fig. 1). The 77-year-old patient lived for 18 months after the device was implanted. The first human pacemaker implantation was performed in Sweden in 1958 but it failed after 3 h. A second unit worked for 8 days. The Swedish pacemakers contained rechargeable batteries. In contrast, Greatbatch’s pacemaker incorporated nonrechargeable mercury–zinc batteries making the device truly implantable. Thus, Greatbatch can rightfully be considered the inventor of the first practical self-contained implantable pacemaker. Greatbatch grew increasingly frustrated with battery technology and mercury–zinc power sources (longevity, 2 years). The mercury–zinc battery was cast in epoxy porous to the release of hydrogen from the batteries. This allowed fluid leaks (water vapor is a gas) into the pacemaker at times causing premature failure. In the early 1970s, Greatbatch acquired the rights to a lithium–iodide battery design invented in 1968 by researchers in a small
[1] W Greatbatch,et al. The solid-state lithium battery: a new improved chemical power source for implantable cardiac pacemakers. , 1971, IEEE transactions on bio-medical engineering.
[2] K. Jeffrey. :The Making of the Pacemaker: Celebrating a Lifesaving Invention , 2003 .
[3] A. Gage,et al. A transistorized, self-contained, implantable pacemaker for the long-term correction of complete heart block. , 1960, Surgery.