Rune Elmqvist

Rune Elmqvist (1906 to 1996) was a Swedish physician turned engineer who developed the first implantable pacemaker in 1958, working under the cardiac surgeon Åke Senning at the Karolinska University Hospital in Solna. Born in Lund, he received his medical degree in 1939 and then worked as an engineer and inventor, building an electronic potentiometer to measure pH in 1927 and a multichannel electrocardiograph in 1931. He joined the electronics firm Elema-Schönander in 1940 and in 1948 developed the first inkjet ECG printer, the mingograph. The first pacemaker was implanted in the patient Arne Larsson on 8 October 1958; it used a single transistor and was moulded in epoxy inside a shoe-polish tin. He became head of development at Elema-Schönander in 1960.