Wilson Greatbatch

Wilson Greatbatch was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1919. He was a radio amateur as a boy, served as an aviation radioman in the Navy during the war, and took an electrical engineering degree at Cornell on the GI Bill. Working on a farm animal research station there, he sat in on lunch conversations with surgeons and heard about heart block, a condition in which the heart\'s natural signal fails to get through.

In 1956, building a device to record heart rhythms at the University of Buffalo, he reached into a box for a resistor and picked the wrong one, a thousand times larger than intended. The circuit began to pulse, pause, and pulse again, about once a second, like a heartbeat. He realised it could drive a heart. Pacemakers existed but were the size of a television and plugged into the wall.

He left his job with a couple of thousand dollars in savings to keep his family for two years and worked in a barn behind his house. With the surgeon William Chardack he built a device small enough to implant, tested it in dogs in 1958, and in 1960 the first patients received it. He licensed it to Medtronic. In the 1970s, unhappy that batteries lasted only about two years, he developed a lithium iodide cell that lasted ten and became the industry standard.

He held more than 150 patents, kept inventing into his eighties, and died in 2011.