Earl Bakken was an American engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Medtronic and developed the first wearable, battery-powered external pacemaker. Working from a garage repair shop for hospital electronic equipment, he built the transistorized pacemaker in 1957 at the request of surgeon C. Walton Lillehei, replacing bulky AC-powered pacemakers with a compact device a patient could wear, which greatly reduced the risk to heart-surgery patients and helped launch the modern medical device industry. Under his leadership Medtronic grew into one of the world's largest medical technology companies, and Bakken remained an advocate for engineering-driven innovation in healthcare throughout his life. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
FAQs
Why did surgeons want a battery-powered pacemaker in 1957?
AC-powered pacemakers tied patients to a wall socket and failed when the power did.
Before 1957, cardiac pacemakers were bulky vacuum-tube units operated by AC power. Patient mobility was greatly restricted, and power failures could be disastrous. Late in 1957 the heart surgeon C. Walton Lillehei of the University of Minnesota asked Earl Bakken to develop a battery-operated pacemaker.
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In Field
Source Earl Bakken (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors
Invented
Built the first wearable external pacemaker in 1958; the first fully implantable pacemaker was designed separately by Rune Elmqvist and Ake Senning the same year.
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Source Earl Bakken (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributorsLead sentence 1tier 2Quote, Lead sentence 1
Earl Elmer Bakken (January 10, 1924 – October 21, 2018) was an American engineer, inventor, businessman and philanthropist.
Sources
1. Earl Bakken (Wikipedia)
Wikipedia contributors, Wikimedia FoundationLead section
Earl Elmer Bakken (January 10, 1924, October 21, 2018) was an American engineer, inventor, businessman and philanthropist.
- In Field: Biomedical Engineering
In Group: Medical Device Inventors, Lead paragraph
he developed the first external, battery-operated, transistorized, wearable artificial pacemaker in 1957
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