An accidental invention that saves lives every day: the pacemaker.

 

The American Wilson Greatbatch was working on the development of a device for recording irregular heartbeats when he accidentally inserted the wrong resistor into the device. The circuit pulsed, stopped and pulsed again, prompting Greatbatch to compare this reaction to the human heart and develop the world's first implantable pacemaker.

 

The implanted pacemaker was used for humans from 1960, until then there were external pacemakers invented by Paul Zoll in 1952. These were about the size of a television set and delivered considerable electric shocks to patients, who often suffered from skin burns as a result.

Greatbatch also developed a lithium iodide battery for the pacemaker.