This was not the first pacemaker. Earl was working with Dr. C. Walton Lillehei, the famous heart surgeon, keeping his electronics working and making whatever Dr. Lillehei wanted in the way of new electronics. The PM-65 Zoll pacemaker he was using was cumbersome, and required line power. It was about the size of a large microwave oven, and filled with vacuum tubes. Naturally, it was not implantable. One night there was a power failure.
Well, you can't have a power failure on something like a pacemaker. It was being used at the time. When I talked with Bakken and Lillehei they didn't agree on whether the patient lived or died. (It was dramatic, but when I discussed it with them it was forty years in the past.) Whatever. They knew something had to be done. "Make me something that runs on batteries," Lillehei said.
Bakken started to make an inverter that ran on car batteries and could power the PM-65. Then he happened on this article, and did it with transistors instead. The pacer he came up with was about 4 inches square and an inch and a half deep, quite light, and worked superbly.
It was soon improved, of course. But it's the way of the world: sometimes just the right information hits just the right person at just the right time, and the world is changed. And all with a popular hobby magazine.
