Celebrity coincidence story

Pacemaker: A Great Invention Caused by "Careless Mistakes"

We often make this mistake and accidentally take out the wrong tools from the toolbox. However, Wilson Gretbach, an assistant professor at the University of Buffalo in the United States, made a simple mistake in the 1950s, which led him to mistakenly invent implantable pacemakers and saved the lives of countless heart patients. At that time, Gretbach was testing a prototype that recorded heartbeat. He should have used a resistor of 65,438+0 megohm on the tape recorder, but what he finally took out of the box and installed on the tape recorder was a resistor of 65,438+0 megohm. As a result, the recorder circuit produced a signal lasting 1.8 milliseconds, and then interrupted 1 second.

Gretbach immediately realized that this current can regulate the heartbeat and treat patients with heart disease. 1960, the world's first successful implantable pacemaker was installed on a 77-year-old man. Suffering from severe heart disease, he was lucky to live 18 months after installing this device. 1985, Gretbach's "accidental invention" was selected by the National Institute of Professional Engineers as one of the greatest 10 engineering inventions in the world in the past half century.