Biography:
Wilson Greatbatch had a pretty normal life throughout his childhood. He went to public school in his home town of Buffalo and then entered WWII. After the war he got his B.S. in Electrical Engineering form Cornell and later revoked a masters from the University of Buffalo.
Contributions:
Greatbatch was studying animal behavior at Cornell during the '50s and was building a device to monitor the heart rate of sheep. While building this device he incorrectly installed a resistor in the circuitry of the heart rate monitor. Instead of measuring the heartbeat the device released electrical impulses that matched the pace beating of a heart. This mistake eventually would lead to the creation of the pacemaker.
Pacemakers during that time where quite large and could not be implantable. Even worse than not being implantable, they did not have their own power supply so patients would have to be literally plugged into a wall for the pace maker to work. With the discovery made by Greatbatch in 1950 led to the creation of the first implantable pacemaker in 1958 with portable power supply.
Technology has come a long way since the first pacemaker in 1958. The devices are much smaller than even the first prototype and the batteries are also to the size that they can be implanted. Greatbatch and many others through time have tried to develop batteries to be smaller and hold more charge which is still the biggest problem with todays pacemakers. From the first pacemaker Greatbatch eventually built one of the largest and most cutting edge medical device company, Medtronic which has bettered the lives of many over the years.
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