Frank Pantridge

Frank Pantridge was born in Hillsborough, County Down, in 1916 and qualified in medicine at Queen\'s University Belfast in 1939. He joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and was in Singapore when it fell in 1942. He won the Military Cross for working through the bombardment, then spent the rest of the war as a prisoner, much of it as a labourer on the Burma railway. When he was freed he weighed a little over five stone and had cardiac beriberi, which affected his heart for the rest of his life.

He became a cardiologist at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. By the 1960s it was well known that a heart that had stopped in a chaotic rhythm could be restarted by an electric shock, but defibrillators were large machines that lived in hospitals. Pantridge noticed that most people who died of heart attacks died in the first hour, at home or in the street, and never reached a machine.

In 1965 he and John Geddes built a defibrillator that worked from car batteries, installed it in an ambulance with a doctor and a nurse, and began going out to patients. It weighed 70 kilograms. By 1968, using a miniature capacitor made for the American space programme, he had got it down to three. His 1967 paper in the Lancet reported people brought back from death outside hospital.

American cities adopted the idea quickly. Britain, to his lasting annoyance, took until 1990 to fit every front-line ambulance. He died in 2004.