Wilson Greatbatch

And his company Greatbatch, Inc, founded in 1970, is still successful today.

The first people to make the implantable pacemaker were Ake Senning, a heart surgeon, and Rune Elmquist, an engineer at Elema-Schonander electronics company, in 1958. The first person to receive the pacemaker was Arne H. W. Larsson. There were many problems with the first pacemakers - broken wires, leaking batteries, exploding pacemakers and runaway devices.

There are several different pacemakers today. There is the Artificial pacemaker; Permanent pacemaker; Internal pacemaker; Cardiac resynchronization therapy; CRT; Biventricular pacemaker. A pacemaker generally has two parts:

• Generator -- contains the battery and the information to control the heartbeat

• Leads -- wires used to connect the heart to the generator and send the electrical impulses to the heart to tell it to beat

Mercury batteries known as the Mercuric oxide batteries were used for the pacemakers because they had the highest capacity per size for their time. They were also known to have extremely stable output voltage. But there was a problem. Mercury batteries were highly toxic, so they required careful waste disposal. Another problem that occurred that is that the mercury cells, originally thought to be amazing, would fail in barely twenty months, causing the patients to go through many more surgeries.

The mercury batteries were replaced by Nuclear batteries, and then Lithium powered batteries. The Lithium powered batteries lasted about ten years instead of the original twenty months on mercury zinc batteries.

Pacemakers have become smaller, smarter, safer, more durable and versatile.

Hayes DL, Zipes DP. Cardiac Pacemakers and Cardioverter-Defibrillators. In: Libby P, Bonow RO, Mann DL, Zipes DP. Libby: Braunwald's Heart Disease: A Textbook of Cardiovascular Medicine. 8th ed. Philadelphia, Pa: Saunders Elsevier; 2007:chap 34.

Prutchi, David. 2005. “Nuclear Pacemakers”.