Wallace Henry Coulter meeting scientists needs

As medicine advances, it relies increasingly on precision in order to accurately diagnose and treat disease. Clearly, this precision can save lives. Because of the work of one Arkansas inventor, Wallace Coulter, this process was made much more accurate and much faster by developing the automated process of counting cells in a blood sample.

Wallace Henry Coulter was born in February 1913 in Little Rock. His father worked for a railroad, and his mother was a school teacher. When he was still young, the family moved to McGehee in Southeast Arkansas, where he spent the remainder of his childhood.

After he graduated from McGehee High School in 1931, he briefly attended college in Missouri before transferring to Georgia Tech to pursue his interest in electronics. However, the Great Depression put a strain on his finances, forcing him to drop out of college by 1934. He spent the next several years working as a salesman or an engineer. After World War II, Coulter went from one company to another. Through his business experiences working with different scientists and encountering different labs, Coulter learned how researchers and physicians conducted their work and what they needed to find. As he began to understand the principles, he began devising different ways to meet the needs of scientists.

He began working in his basement, experimenting with different devices that could help doctors and researchers with their own lab work. Eventually, he came across a process to count cells in a given sample. By 1948, he had completed an automatic counter for blood samples. As a result, an important medical breakthrough was made in a makeshift lab in a basement in Chicago by a man who never completed college. He received a patent for his invention in 1953.

The entire process was based on what is now called the Coulter Principle. Whenever a cell passed through an electrical current in Coulter’s device, it would disrupt an electrical flow. Those disruptions could be counted to determine how many cells were passing through that current, and therefore, the number of cells in a particular sample. Though similar ideas had been used in electronics for decades before this, Coulter’s invention was one of the earliest practical applications in medicine.

The ability to count the number of cells in a blood sample was an important part of making medical diagnoses. It was used to determine whether an infection was present or if some disorder in the blood existed. And it was used to determine whether a patient had contracted such diseases as leukemia. Before Coulter’s automated process, cell counts had to been done manually by physicians and lab technicians, which was an exhaustive, slow, and sometimes inaccurate process.

Coulter and his younger brother, Joseph, took the invention, marketing it as the Coulter Counter, and sold it across the country. The two formed Coulter Electronics in 1958 in Miami, Florida. He continued to perfect his device over the years as customers from across the globe bought his counter.

Coulter received many awards for his work. He received honorary doctorates from five universities, including Georgia Tech. He continued to receive well-earned praise for his work for years afterward and was often asked to speak before conferences of physicians, technicians, and engineers. In 1998, he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering.

By the late 1990s, the company boasted that it made 95% of all blood cell counters in the world and held more than 2,400 patents. The small company grew to employ more than 5,000 people, with the simple slogan of “science serving humanity.”

The two brothers remained active with the company for four decades. Joe Coulter died in 1998. Company founder and innovator Wallace Coulter also died in Miami that year at the age of 85. In 2004, he was honored by also being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.