Today’s pacemakers are about the size of a small matchbox, and future models are expected to shrink even further, becoming smaller than a grain of rice. Now, these devices, depending on the model, can last as long as 10 to 15 years before needing replacement and can automatically adjust based on a patient’s activity level. They can now connect to the internet and transmit real-time data to physicians, without patients even coming into the hospital. And with how close we are to AI superintelligence, future pacemakers might be able to predict complications before they occur or optimize pacing algorithms based on individual heart patterns.
Interestingly, the pacemaker wasn’t always as small and efficient as it is today. Early artificial pacemaker machines were about the size of a bedside cabinet and had to be plugged into wall outlets to run. As you can imagine, if there was any power outage, the system would go off. So, although they could pace a heart, they were painful, very uncomfortable, and often unreliable. At the time, there were three major problems with those early artificial pacemaker machines: power source, portability, and implantability.
Earl Bakken, a medical equipment repairman in Minneapolis, fixed the first two. He created the first battery-operated, wearable pacemaker at the request of surgeon C. Walton Lillehei. About the size of a paperback book, patients wore it around their necks while wires passed through their chest from open-heart surgery. While it was a significant leap forward, the device left patients vulnerable to infections through the external wires. As for implantability, that was a solution Wilson Greatbatch discovered entirely by mistake.
Wilson Greatbatch, an electrical engineer teaching at the University of Buffalo, New York, was building a device to record heartbeats. While assembling the circuit, he grabbed the wrong resistor from his toolbox. He inserted a 1-megohm resistor instead of a 10,000-ohm one. When he powered up the circuit, instead of recording, it emitted rhythmic electrical pulses at roughly one per second. Greatbatch immediately recognized what he was hearing.
He later recalled:
This Medical Device Can Extend People’s Lives (And Was Invented Entirely By Accident)
