As with so many great cardiac innovations of the past century, the inspiration for Greatbatch’s invention was a mistake. In the early 1950s, Greatbatch was working on a livestock farm near Ithaca, New York, testing instruments to monitor heart rate and brain waves in sheep and goats, when he learned about heart block from two surgeons doing a summer research sabbatical there. “When they described it, I knew I could fix it,” Greatbatch later wrote. A few years later in Buffalo, Greatbatch was working with the newly invented transistor when he accidentally installed a resistor into a circuit he
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