Pioneer in pacemakers, founder of Medtronic dies

Earlier versions of life-saving device were plugged into sockets, weren’t implantable

Earl Bakken, an electrical engineer who built the first wearable, batterypowered pacemaker in the 1950s, an innovation that helped save millions of lives and set his company, Medtronic, on a path to become one of the world’s leading manufacturers of medical devices, died Oct. 21 at his home on Kiholo Bay in Hawaii. He was 94.

His company announced the death in a statement but did not cite a cause.

Bakken and a brother-in-law cofounded Medtronic — the name was formed by combining the words “medical” and “electronic” — in a Minneapolis garage in 1949. In their early years, they repaired TV sets as well as hospital equipment to keep the business afloat.

By 2017, Medtronic had annual revenue of more than $29.7 billion, according to the company. Its product line today includes an array of medical devices, among them insulin pumps, cardiac stents and deep brain stimulation systems. But for years it was best known for pacemakers, which deliver electrical impulses to damaged hearts to maintain normal rhythm.

In the early years of his business repairing hospital equipment, Bakken met C. Walton Lillehei, a physician at the University of Minnesota who became known as a father of open-heart surgery.

Lillehei asked for Bakken’s help after losing a patient, an infant suffering from “blue-baby” syndrome, during a power outage on Halloween 1957.

The baby had been hooked up to a pacemaker, which at the time was a large apparatus connected to a wall socket. What was needed, Lillehei said, was a smaller machine that ran on battery power.

Bakken recalled a design he had seen in Popular Mechanics for a metronome, a device that emits steady clicking sounds to assist musicians in keeping time during practice sessions. The design could be modified, he realized, to mimic the steady beating of a heart.

Bakken tested his device on a dog and, the next day, found Lillehei using it on a human patient at the hospital.

Shortly thereafter, another electrical engineer, Wilson Greatbatch, and a collaborating surgeon, William Chardack, developed a pacemaker that could be implanted in a patient’s body. In 1960, Medtronic won the license to manufacture the new devices, which further revolutionized cardiac care.

As a patient, Bakken was outfitted with an insulin pump, heart stents and two pacemakers by Medtronic.

“I’m glad I invented the company,” he told the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 2010, “or I wouldn’t be sitting here.”