IEEE History Center: Wilson Greatbatch Abstract

Greatbatch worked as a radioman for the Navy, reserves and active duty, from 1938 to the end of World War II. In service, he also studied radar and set up a radio school, instructing in aviation radio, and flew on first radar patrols along Texas coastline against German subs. After the war he went to Cornell for a BS in electrical engineering on the GI Bill. He began building/selling radio telescope equipment and building amplifiers to measure heart rate and blood pressure of sheep and goats for the Psychology Department, and for a monkey sent up into space. Gets him interested in medical electronics. Details of his research and studies follow, which got him to the point where in 1958 he implanted a pacemaker in an animal. Working closely with Earl Bakken and Medtronic Company, and Dr. William Chardack, improving the batteries, their first implantation was in 1960.

Pacemakers were universally accepted by 1965. In 1970, when Greatbatch’s exclusive contract with Bakken and Medtronics ran out, he went into the business of making batteries himself, since Medtronics would not make what he considered to be necessary improvements. Wilson Greatbatch Ltd. now makes or licenses 90% of all batteries for pacemakers and implantable defibrillators. His company’s research in the 1970s resulted in lithium batteries with triple the life expectancy, such that most patients could expect to have only one pacemaker in their lifetime. Greatbatch has also done research on AIDS, alternative energy, and fusion.

1	Family history: father’s occupation in England, move to the US, and his marriage.
2	Interest in radio as a youngster in a Senior Scouts program, the Sea Scouts, who built a loft in which to build a radio transmitter in 1936; relayed messages during a storm in New England and received a citation from the American Red Cross. This group grew and trained younger members to get their amateur radio licenses.
3	After high school, Greatbach was a radio serviceman at a radio store in downtown Buffalo. Some of his colleagues volunteered for active duty. The sea scouts group continued to grow and became professors of electrical engineering, senior technicians and radio servicemen; Sorority of wives.
4	He became a Third Class Naval Radioman in 1938 first in the reserves, then on active duty in 1940. Greatbach was sent to Canada to study radar; trained there, then set up a radio school at Annapolis near the Naval Academy.
5	Began to instruct; subsequently transferred to a large naval base in Corpus Christi, Texas where pilots were trained. Ward Island was near there, and it became one of the Navy’s chief schools for aviation radar; he flew on the first radar patrols down in Texas because of which the Germans promptly stopped sinking Mexican freighters.
6	Transferred to a dive-bombing squadron on one of the first of the small carriers where he remained for the rest of his naval career; Gerald Ford was a Deck Officer on his ship; George H. W. Bush was a torpedo plane pilot on his sister ship.
7	Greatbach was a senior enlisted man and in charge of all the enlisted gunners; did most of the radio and radar maintenance work, flew as a skippers gunner on two-place airplanes, and trained next squadron; memories of the atomic bomb and the attack on Pearl Harbor.
8	He worked for a year for the telephone company; then was accepted into the Electrical Engineering Department at Cornell University
9	Greatbach got his Bachelor’s degree at Cornell sponsored by the GI bill.
10	More on the GI bill; using his First Class Radio Telephone License he had several side jobs running radio stations and helped to build some of the early radio telescope equipment; Greatbach also started building amplifiers to measure the heart rate and blood pressure of sheep and goats for the Psychology Department and participated in conditioned reflex experiments.
11	This allowed him to build all the amplifiers for one of the first monkeys shot up into space, which was what initiated his interest in the field of medical electronics; majored in Communications and Power at Cornell; discussion of the professors there; worked a year at the Animal Behavior Farm
12	Greatbach worked on airport computers at Cornell’s Aeronautical Laboratory; he helped start the first local chapter of the Biomedical Engineering Group of the IEEE in the country and a chapter of the IRE at Cornell which later became the IEEE; explanation of his work of amplifying the millivolt amplitude of the signal generated by the heart; early work done with vacuum tubes.
13	He learns about Stokes-Adam syndrome (1949-1951) in which a nerve in the heart that runs from auricle to the ventricle quits functioning so that the auricle beats but the ventricle doesn’t follow from which 50 percent who contract this disease died in the first year; working to correct this communications problem.
14	Difficulty in finding interested surgeons; the problems of external pacemakers made by Paul Zoll and Earl Bakken.
15	Transistors were invented and allowed him to make a pacemaker for implantation into an animal in 1958; he quit all his jobs and made fifty pacemakers in the barn behind his house because no medical equipment manufacturer expressed interest.
16	Worked closely with Earl Bakken and his Medtronic Company; they had ten successful patients and then licensed the pacemaker to Medtronic; Greatbach worked with Dr. William Chardack who was active in the engineering design of the electrodes and Dr. Andrew Gage as a result of his connection to them through the local chapter of the PGME in Buffalo.
17	Early animal trials with Dr. Chadrack; first subject lasted only four hours because they thought they could seal the pacemaker with electrical tape; next they tried a solid epoxy block and the Medtronic electrode; connection with Medtronic.
18	The first electrodes and the mercury batteries they used were inadequate; moved to the Ruben- Mallory battery; battery remained the limiting factor.
19	Mercury and sodium hydroxide batteries expelled gases through the permeable epoxy cast, but water vapor is also a gas which permeated the unit so the batteries had to be able to work in a wet environment; these batteries rarely lasted more than two years meaning that the average patient who lived six years on the pacemaker had to get three in their lifetime.
20	Focused on the batteries; looked at NiCads, rechargeable through the chest, and nuclear batters both of which were too problematic.
21	They created the lithium battery in 1970, which had a much longer life than mercury and didn’t generate gas and so could be hermetically sealed; the first pacemaker using this battery lasted more than 22 years; the first animal implantation was in 1958 and their first human implantation (the first to last longer than a year) in 1960.
22	Greatbach had no outside financial support until his group had ten working patients, but then signed an exclusive contract with Medtronics for ten years.
23	Chose Medtronics because of their experience manufacturing the wearable pacemaker; relationship to Earl Bakken; publicity through publishing and giving papers at meetings.
24	It took only five years (by 1965) for the pacemaker to become universally accepted as the way to complete heart block; some early skepticism.
25	For the first ten years (until 1970), Greatbach maintained complete design control over all of the implantable pacemakers made; he subsequently ended his contract with Earl Bakken on good terms because he wanted to make a better battery.
26	GE had been making batteries and pacemakers using the design of Dr. Adrian Kantorwitz and others in Syracuse; the three biggest makers of pacemakers in 1960 to 1962 were General Electric, Medtronic, and Electrodyne (Dr. Zoll’s group in Boston.
27	Medtronic was technically bankrupt when Greatbatch signed but he took stock and joined the Board of Directors and helped them become number one in the business.
28	Choosing and working with Medtronic and Earl Bakken.
29	International influence of the Medtronic pacemaker; the Catalyst Research Corporation created a lithium battery.
30	Problems with Catalyst Research resolved by their departure from the battery business; Wilson Greatbatch Ltd. became the sole provider of this battery. Has continued expanding, developing new models. Today make or license 90% of all batteries for pacemakers and implantable defibrillators.
31	Also make batteries for outer space, bottoms of oil wells, other specialty markets. But biggest business remains implantable medical batteries, implantable power for artificial hearts, etc.
32	Company producing implantable defibrillators, started getting significant medical usage 5-6 years ago. Significant battery, capacitor, discharge design. Customers designing more than Greatbatch or his company.
33	Greatbatch dropped out of things between 1985 and 1990.
34	Was interested in chemistry of batteries too, electrochemistry, learning how to keep batteries from corroding. His career centrally on chemistry of electrodes and batteries, plus some biomass energy work. Now interested in nuclear energy. Spent 20 years working on a cure for AIDS in molecular biology.
35	Tangible result of 1970s development of lithium battery was that 80% of patients got one implanted pacemaker in their lifetime rather than three. Greater lifetime and hermetic sealing perhaps as important as development of pacemaker itself. Catalyst Research gets credit for basic research.
36	His company started with 3 people. Bought battery operation of Wurlitzer Company. Up to 20 people in 2 years. Now up to 800. Now licensing technology. Wanted customers to be friends, not enemies, so allow significant amount of licensing. Also is very profitable. There are many improvement patents to license as well. Greatbatch personally has more than 200 patents; company has many more.
37	Company spends 10% of gross on R&D for new batteries, from day one. At start, was spending 90% on R&D. Greatbactch spending time on lab and on business. But is now a professional accounting, business system, not so much involved.
38	Anecdote about building a pacemaker for an exhibit recently.
39	Sees market growth possible for pacemakers—only a few areas in the world saturated. Artificial heart growth will be sky high once anti-clotting technology is figured out.
40	Important improvements: doubling sides of lithium batteries, cutting density in two and impedance by four. Sandwich structure and lithiasis. Shrinking size to wristwatch size. First goal had been reliability; other goals followed.
41	Medicaid scandals about false/inflated claims for pacemakers can hurt sales, but only temporarily.
42	Drifted away from business when problems became administrative rather than technical. 1982 wrote book 25 Years of Pacing.
43	High opinion of medical doctors, both for dedication and openness to technology. Collaborations with medical doctors can break down over Greatbatch’s insistence on publication equality—he first author on engineering papers, doctors first authors on medical papers.
44	Collaboration with Dr. William Chardack, 1958 to 1970s, dozens of papers, very solid. No matter who did the work, each would be listed as sole author in papers in their respective fields.
45	Respect for engineers Barough Berkovits, Walter Keller, Mac Cortis, Arnold Kantorwitz, Robert Anderson.
46	Involvement in 1950s in Professional Group of Medical Electronics and the International Federation of Biomedical Electronics. Member of Electrochemical Society.
47	AIDS work: trying to block replication of AIDS virus. Working with Michael Minor Weiner, entrepeneur from Rochester.
48	Biomass interest: a type of poplar tree that produces more energy than any other plant between the Hudson River and the Mason-Dixon line, which grows very fast. Growing trees, burning them in turbogenerators, using wasted heat in stills to make wood alcohol to run cars, to heat town water. Town sewage sludge used to fertilize poplar trees. But oil price collapse stopped that research. Now interested in Helium-III fusion energy.