Wilson Greatbatch

Wilson Greatbatch (born September 6, 1919 in Buffalo , New York ; † September 27, 2011 ) was an American inventor who applied for patents for around 325 inventions and who not only invented an implantable pacemaker , but also a corrosion-free lithium battery . These inventions made the implantation of pacemakers under local anesthesia a routine operation.

Life

The son of one of England coming contractor served during the Second World War in the US Navy , in which he electronic components on a destroyer repaired as well as radio officers to escort trains to Iceland . He later taught at a radar school and most recently as a rear gunner in bomber missions. After the war he worked as a telephone fitter for a year before studying electrical engineering at Cornell University . To finance this degree, the father of three worked at the radio station and as an electrician at the university's radio telescope .

After earning a Masters of Science degree in Electrical Engineering, he became manager of the electronics division of Taber Instrument Corporation in Buffalo, but started his own business when the company had no interest in his pacemaker.

Although Greatbatch is often called the "inventor" of the pacemaker, he did not invent the first pacemaker or the first implantable pacemaker. Rather, scientists have been concerned with the idea of making the heart jump again with electricity since the 18th century . The first serious attempts did not come until the 1920s. The first pacemakers were the size of a small refrigerator and, when plugged into an electrical outlet, delivered electrical shocks using an insulated needle and thus alternating current to restart the heart.

It was not until 1958 that the first pacemaker made by Åke Senning and Rune Elmqvist was implanted in a human body during an operation in Sweden at the Karolinska Institute in Solna . However, the latter stopped working after three hours, while a second pacemaker worked for two days. Although further improvements followed, implanted pacemakers only worked a few months later.

Greatbatch began working on pacemakers in 1956 when he was hired as an electrical engineer by the Institute for Research on Chronic Diseases in Buffalo to build an oscillator to measure and record heartbeats. During construction, he tested a resistor to complete the electronic circuit . However, the resistor he chose was the wrong size, and instead of oscillating, it produced a non-uniform signal with a rapid pulse followed by an interval where the transistor was cut off and drawing almost no current. When he realized that this could drive a heart, he quit his job and started a workshop in a barn with his savings.

In 1958, William Chardack, a surgeon at Buffalo Veterans Administration Hospital, sought advice from him about a problem with another medical device. Greatbatch asked him if Chardack would be interested in a pacemaker the size of a matchbox, to which Chardack replied, "If they could invent this, they would save 10,000 lives a year." A few weeks later, Chardock successfully implanted one of Greatbatch's pacemakers in a dog, before one of those pacemakers was implanted in a 77-year-old man with an irregular heartbeat on June 6, 1960.

The cardiac pacemaker, known as the Chardack Greatbatch Pacemaker, did not differ from other rival prototypes in that it was the first or the better designed one - of the first 16 implanted Chardack Greatbatch Pacemakers, 10 had broken cables, five premature battery errors and one an electrical fault Component - but because it made it to the US market better than foreign products. This pacemaker was in 1961 by at Minneapolis -based company Medtronic licensed, which makes this of pacemakers and the world's leading manufacturers of implantable cardioverter defibrillators was.

Even if Greatbatch was not the inventor of the pacemaker, he made significant and important contributions to pacemaker technology such as the design of new, more powerful lithium batteries. The Greatbatch Company, named after him, has been developing power components for the entire medical device industry since the 1970s. The lithium batteries he developed revolutionized pacemaker technology with a safe, reliable and long-lasting power supply, which made regular interventions to change the batteries unnecessary. As a result, around 1 million people around the world have a pacemaker implanted every year.

Although Greatbatch's inventions made him prosperous, he never stopped inventing. He applied for around 325 patents with the US Patent and Trademark Office . His inventions include devices used in AIDS research and a solar-powered canoe that he used on a trip to Finger Lakes on his 72nd birthday . In later years he was concerned with the development of alternative fuels, using materials such as soybeans and poplar, and also conducted experiments with helium fusions.

He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his inventions .

Publications

• The Making of the Pacemaker. Celebrating a Lifesaving Invention , 2000, ISBN 978-1-57392-806-9

source

• Medicine Obituaries: Wilson Greatbatch . In: The Telegraph . September 28, 2011.