Thanks to Dick D
From the NYT: “Earl E. Bakken, who, working in a Minneapolis garage, invented the first wearable, battery-powered pacemaker and went on to help create the world’s largest medical device company, died on Sunday at his home in Hawaii. He was 94.
His death, near Kiholo Bay in the North Kona District of the Big Island, was announced by Medtronic, the company he and a brother-in-law founded in 1949 when Mr. Bakken was a 25-year-old electrical engineering student.
The partnership got off to a slow start. Originally conceived as a repair shop for hospitals’ electronic equipment, Medtronic made $8 in its first month in business. But following a blackout in the Twin Cities in 1957, a young surgeon asked Mr. Bakken if he could make a pacemaker that would not be dependent on the hospital’s power supply. Mr. Bakken fashioned a small, battery-powered device, basing the circuit on a design for a metronome that he had found in a back issue of Popular Electronics magazine.”