Accidental Inventions The Pacemaker

It's comforting to know that even the great inventors can get their wires crossed. They may get blown up, but on the other hand they may find they have stumbled on something truly useful.

During the late 1950s Wilson Greatbatch, a University of Buffalo Professor, was working with cardiologists to find a way to record human heart sounds. One day, while constructing an experimental machine for this purpose, he decided he needed to install 1 10,000-ohm resistor (a current regulating device). Greatbatch reached into his toolbox and inadvertently pulled out a 1,000,000-ohm resistor. It was an easy mistake to make – the colour codes on the tiny electrical components were almost identical: brown/black/orange for the type he was after, brown/black/green for the one he selected.

Once he had installed the 'wrong' resistor, Greatbatch checked the circuit. There was a pulse, then a second's silence, then another pulse. It sounded just like a heartbeat. 'I said 'wait a minute – this is a pacemaker!" the inventor later recalled.

The next task was to shrink the new machine to manageable on proportions. So greatbatch settled down in an old barn ‘to solve the problem how to reduce an electronic apparatus the size ok a kitchen cabinet to the size of a baby’s hand, in order to be able to implant this pacemaker in the chest’. Within two years, he had come up with the world’s first implantable cardiac pacemaker. He filed a US patent application for the device on July 22, 1960. Then to complete the job, he invented a non-corrosive lithium battery to power it.

Greatbatch, who was born in 1919 and has been awarded more than 150 American patents, was inducted into the Inventors’ Hall of Fame in 1986. His pacemaker has prolonged the lives of millions including Dick Cheney and Mother Teresa.