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12.11
How to Invent
By Donald Christiansen
Not long ago I attended a
meeting of high school students preparing to
enter a contest in which they were required to
build something new and innovative. One of the
students, learning of my engineering background,
cornered me and asked “How do you invent?”
Engineers don’t do it intentionally, I told him,
but rather because we have to, if only to make
improvements in a product or a process. The
degree of innovation varies, and not all
inventions warrant patents. Invention is a part
of engineering, I said.
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Wilson Greatbatch in 2000 |
A few weeks later I learned that
Wilson Greatbatch (pictured at right), holder of
more than 225 patents, the most notable of which
was that of the implantable pacemaker, had died.
It immediately struck me that I could have cited
Greatbatch’s philosophy of invention as an
appropriate response to the young student. What
follows is what I might have told him, at least
in part.
Greatbatch, I should note, was a
fellow EE classmate of mine at Cornell. As World
War II veterans, we both benefited from the G.I.
Bill to help us finance our education. Both of
us had served on aircraft carriers, Greatbatch
as a radioman/gunner on torpedo bombers. He was
also a ham radio operator, having acquired his
license while still in high school. At war’s
end, he married, worked a year as a telephone
installer-repairman, then entered Cornell. To
supplement his income he ran the university
radio transmitter on weekends, and built IF
amplifiers for what became the Arecibo radio
telescope. Upon graduation he began aerospace
work at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory and
worked part-time at the Chronic Disease Research
Institute, where he built a 1 Khz marker
oscillator using a transistor and a UTC
transformer. In a story he often repeated over
the years, he accidentally inserted a 1 megohm
resistor into the circuit instead of the
intended 10 K resistor. The result was a
blocking oscillator that proved ideal for
pacemaker use.
Enter the IRE/IEEE
Greatbatch joined the Institute
of Radio Engineers (IRE) Professional Group in
Medical Electronics (now the IEEE Engineering in
Medicine & Biology Society), through which, in
1958, he met Dr. William Chardack, chief of
surgery at the Veterans Administration Hospital
in Buffalo. He put the idea of an implantable
pacemaker to Dr. Chardack, who responded
enthusiastically. External pacemakers had
existed for some time, but many cardiologists
had rejected the notion of an implantable
pacemaker because, as they told Greatbatch, most
patients die in a year or so.
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A
technical drawing of Wilson Greatbatch's
Cardiac Implantable Demand Pacemaker
U.S. Patent No.
3,478,746
(1965)
Photo source: U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office |
Spurred by the encouragement of
Dr. Chardack, Greatbatch retreated to the
workshop in his barn, where, in less than three
weeks, he had built his first trial pacemaker.
Dr. Chardack and fellow surgeon Andrew Gage
tested it on the heart of a dog, which beat in
perfect synchrony with the pacemaker. In two
years, working alone, Greatbatch made fifty
pacemakers. Forty were implanted in animals and
the other ten in patients of Dr. Chardack. One
of the early patients, a woman in her sixties,
was in complete block when she received the
implant, and lived for more than twenty years.
There were many problems with
the early pacemakers, not the least of which was
limited battery life. Others involved the
reliability of miniature transformers,
inconsistent quality of early transistors
(contamination and leaky seals), failure of
tantalum capacitors, and difficulties with epoxy
encapsulants. Electrodes and leads presented
still more problems, involving both chemical
reactions and metal fatigue. These and their
solutions are treated in detail in a memoir
privately published by Greatbatch in 1983. It
was republished, with some additions, in 2000 (The
Making of the Pacemaker, Prometheus
Books).
An Inventive Philosophy
I remember Wilson as a colleague
who was always thinking, always ready for a
discussion, never at a loss for words, and,
oddly, never seemingly in a hurry or under
stress, quite possibly good characteristics for
a prolific inventor. He also possessed a good
sense of humor. Greatbatch gave us not only a
lifesaving invention, but also recorded his
personal thoughts on invention, engineering and
professionalism. Here are just a few of them:
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On design and innovation,
Greatbatch’s paradigm was “to look for a
place to use something I do very well,”
rather than to look for a problem to solve.
He did not want to spend his entire career
“fruitlessly picking away at some insoluble
problem.” In the design process he favored
the “big jump,” to “throw a breadboard
together to see what it does.” If it worked
marginally, he would refine it later.
In the initial design stage he preferred to
work alone, so he would be aware of errors
or opportunities for improvement. Others
might be allowed to take over later. In the
early stages he would favor “ridiculously
large safety factors.” In the case of the
pacemaker, he became a seasoned student of
reliability and failure modes and
mechanisms, with the goal of increasing the
lifespan of implantable devices.
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On the subject of
creativity, he warned the many young student
classes he spoke to over the years that any
set of rules for achieving creativity would
be fruitless if not accompanied by hard
work, long hours, and, at times, no monetary
reward. In his memoir he wrote “To ask for a
successful experiment, for professional
stature, for financial reward, or for peer
approval is asking to be paid for what
should be a labor of love.” It was therefore
no surprise that he made no reference in the
memoir to his election to the National
Inventors Hall of Fame, his receipt of the
National Medal of Technology, or election as
a Fellow of IEEE and as an Eminent Member of
Eta Kappa Nu. He also failed to boast of the
several companies he founded with proceeds
from royalties from licensing his pacemaker
inventions.
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His modest view of
professional recognition notwithstanding,
Greatbatch emphasized the importance of
membership in organizations pertinent to an
engineer’s special interests. The engineer
should be an active and contributing member
of the engineering society of his or her own
profession, both on the national and local
levels, he said, and should strive for the
highest member grade possible, publish in
its journals where appropriate, attend
meetings and conventions, and get to know
the senior people in the field. Also, he
warned, one should never allow his name to
be listed as an author unless he
participated in the work and fully supported
its conclusions.
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On the topic of persistence,
Greatbatch accepted the inevitability of
project failure, stating that while nine out
of ten experiments may fail, the success of
the tenth will pay for the others. Among the
failures experienced by Greatbatch was a
costly, five-year attempt to develop a
bladder stimulator. At the other extreme, a
company he founded in 1970 and now renamed
Greatbatch, Inc., in 2006 reported revenue
of more than $270 million, nearly 85 percent
of it from batteries, capacitors, and other
components for use in implantable medical
devices. The company was launched when
Greatbatch acquired rights to a
lithium-iodine battery that he redesigned as
an implantable long-life power supply for
pacemakers, to replace the limited-life
zinc-mercury batteries then in use.
It would not surprise me if a
review of Greatbatch’s philosophy and
accomplishments were to inspire youngsters
interested in science and technology to follow
his examples and thus learn “how to invent.”
Resources
Greatbatch, W., The Making of
the Pacemaker, Prometheus Books, 2000.
Medical Cardiac Pacemaker, U.S. Patent No.
3,057,356 (1962)
Cardiac Implantable Demand Pacemaker, U.S.
Patent No. 3,478,746 (1965)
Greatbatch, W., et al., “A
Transistorized Implantable Pacemaker for the
Long Term Correction of Complete Atrio-Ventricular
Block,” Proc. New England Research and
Engineering Meeting, 1959.
Lagergren, H., “How It Happened:
My Recollection of Early Pacing,” Pacing and
Clinical Electrophysiology, 1978.
Swedberg, G., “Engineer,
Inventor, and Entrepreneur: Wilson Greatbatch,”
Profiles in Engineering Leadership, The
IEEE History Center, 2004.
Donald Christiansen is the
former editor and publisher of IEEE Spectrum
and an independent publishing consultant. He is
a Fellow of the IEEE.
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