![]() ![]() Spencer, widely known as an electronics genius after his stint in the Navy in WWI, was working for Raytheon in 1939, and his ideas and knowledge about radar helped the company win a government contract to develop the new technology and deploy it as “combat radar.” Especially as WWII was on the horizon, this was actually the second highest priority project for the military only after the Manhattan Project. Greatbatch, seeing the biggest limitation of his pacemaker device hinge on the 2-year battery life, later acquired the rights to a lithium iodide battery, which would make his design last 10 years or more, and he redesigned it - the original version was potentially “explosive” - and later, his redesigned battery was adapted in countless medical devices, and still is. His 2-inch device was debuted in testing on dogs in 1958 at the Buffalo Veterans Administration, and eventually, his device was licensed by Medtronic, and the rest, as they say, is history. ![]() There were other research labs doing the same, so he worked urgently to get it done - documented in the book he wrote about the experience, The Making of the Pacemaker. Seeing the value of such a device, he immediately set to work trying to make it small enough to fit inside a human. The intermittent electrical impulses that the device created because of that final resistor were very much like the sounds of a human heartbeat. This was one of those “fortuitous” accidents, as it turned out. In 1956, as he was trying to finish the circuit where he worked at the University of Buffalo as an assistant professor, he accidentally grabbed the wrong sized resistor and used it instead. He’d been working on a device to record the rhythm of a human heartbeat. ![]()
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