Wilson Greatbach:INVENTOR WHOSE INGENUITY SAVED MILLIONS OF LIVES AND CHANGED THE COURSE OF MEDICAL HISTORY

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Wilson Greatbatch was not a doctor. Yet his ingenuity changed the course of medical history. "This is the story of how a very average person developed into one of the country's greatest inventors with more than 140 patents. His most famous invention, called the cardiac pacemaker, keeps the rhythm of millions of heartbeats and helps people live longer and better."

Pacemakers Were as Big as Television Sets While Greatbach Designed a Small Implantable Pacemaker

He was best known for his small portable pacemaker breakthrough, an example of Pasteur’s observation that “chance favors the prepared mind.....


The first pacemakers had been very large making them useless for mobility. Some early designs were the size of a television and needed to be plugged into a wall socket.



"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".



According to another source "Then, quite by accident, Greatbatch's "eureka moment" happened in 1958. Transistors had recently become available, and Greatbatch was building an oscillator with one transistor to record heartbeat sounds. He incorporated the wrong transistor, which produced a pulse that mimicked the rhythm of a heart. "I stared at the thing in disbelief, thinking this was exactly the properties of a pacemaker," said Greatbatch".



"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".

Wilson Greatbatch, Inventor of Implantable Pacemaker, Dies at 92

Greatbach Inventor Award

Greatbach Technologies