Here’s something that’ll be music to most people’s ears who are involved in R&D. Speaking to the Associated Press, lifelong inventor Wilson Greatbatch said: “Nine things out of 10 don’t work”. But don’t despair, “The 10th one will pay for the other nine”.
In Greatbatch’s case, the treasured 10th wasn’t accompanied so much by the sound of music as the rhythm of a heartbeat.
A medical researcher at the University of Buffalo, New York, Greatbatch’s defining moment came when building an oscillator to record heart rhythms. Raking around in a box of components one day, his hand settled on the wrong size of resistor… precisely the wrong size as it turns out.
Because when Greatbatch assembled the device, something quite remarkable happened. Instead of just recording sounds as it was supposed to, the poorly put-together device generated the familiar ‘lub dub’ of the heart or – to put it a little more scientifically – pulsed for 1.8 milliseconds, stopped for a second, and then did the same again.
Greatbatch’s wasn’t the first cardiac pacemaker, but unlike its predecessors his version didn’t need to be plugged into the mains and wasn’t the size of a TV. In fact, with a little refinement, Greatbatch’s implantable device reduced down to just two cubic inches. First used on a human patient in 1960, today more than half a million of the device are implanted every year.
So if at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try, try and try again.
