Development of the Cardiac Pacemaker

Scottish physiologist John Alexander MacWilliam showed as early as 1889 that an electrical impulse applied to the heart could trigger a contraction, and American cardiologist Albert Hyman coined the term artificial pacemaker for a spring-wound external device he built in 1932, but the modern implantable pacemaker was not achieved until October 8, 1958, when Swedish engineer Rune Elmqvist and surgeon Ake Senning implanted a self-contained device of Elmqvist's design into a patient at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. That first device failed after only three hours and a second lasted about two days, but the patient, Arne Larsson, went on to receive twenty-six pacemakers over his lifetime, outliving both the inventor and the surgeon who had implanted his first one. American engineer Wilson Greatbatch's development of the long-lived lithium-iodide battery in 1971 extended pacemaker battery life from roughly a year to about eleven years, a breakthrough that established the design standard modern pacemakers still follow and allowed the devices to become a routine, long-term treatment for people with dangerously slow or irregular heartbeats.