Who invented Pacemaker?

Wilson Greatbatch, 1946

The heart is essentially a muscle that serves as a pump, sending a pulse of blood into our arteries every second or so. Some heart problems can be traced to a faulty heartbeat. Nervous impulses, generated in a piece of heart tissue called the pacemaker, fail to drive the heart in a reliable rhythm. The solution is the artificial pacemaker, able to send regular pulses of electric current into the natural one if it is failing.

Why Pacemaker use in heart?

The idea of using electricity to shock the heart muscle back into regular action is an old one; 19^th century physicians tried to induce the needed currents from outside the body. The first to try this internally was probably Canadian engineer John Hopps, around 1941. Cables were run through the chest wall into the heart tissue, but the pulse was generated from outside from equipment the size of a modern TV, and the shocks delivered were painful.

The implantable artificial pacemaker, carried within the bodies of millions of people with troublesome hearts, was invented by American bioengineer Wilson Creatbatch around 1958. There was some serendipity. While building a device to record heart sounds, he stumbled upon a circuit that produces regular pulses like heartbeats. It was small enough to fit inside the patient’s chest. Having generated interest among heart surgeons, Greatbatch begin hand-crafting pacemakers. Once the pacemaker had been implanted, the user was soon unaware of its operation. Around 1970 Greatbatch matched his new device with a small lightweight lithium battery to power it, similar to the mobile phones and laptop batteries. With circuits driven by transistors, the pacemaker drew so little current that battery lasted for years.

Modern pacemakers have the added advantage of microprocessor control. They are able to respond more flexibly to changes in the heartbeat, including detecting and dealing with fibrillation or tachycardia, when the heart beats very fast and inefficiently. In 1983 the American National Society of Professional Engineers rated the pacemaker as one of the ten most important engineering contributions to human society in the previous