Willem Einthoven

Willem Einthoven was a physiologist at the University of Leiden in Holland who became famous as the inventor of the electrocardiogram, one of the most important medical inventions of all time. He was born on 21 May 1860 in Semarang on the island of Java, in the former Dutch East Indies, and in 1886 became professor of physiology at the University of Leiden, where he taught until his death in 1927. In 1908 he set out to record the sounds of the human heart accurately with the Lippmann electrometer, and the inadequacy of that device led him to refine the string galvanometer for measuring the rhythms of the heart, a process that took three years of intense work. The string galvanometer remains a standard of reference in electrocardiography. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1924.