(c) 2026 David Prutchi and Daniel Villamil. All rights reserved
I’m pleased to share that our paper is now available online in PACE: “Pioneering Rhythm Management: A Design Analysis of the Earliest Battery-Powered Implantable Pacemakers.”
Over the past year, my colleague Daniel Villamil and I have pursued this as a hobby project, combining historical research with hands-on engineering. We analyze the earliest battery-powered implantable pacemakers developed independently by Rune Elmqvist (1958) and Wilson Greatbatch (1960), and we reconstruct faithful working replicas to explore the design tradeoffs and constraints that shaped these devices.
The print version will be published soon. The online version is here: http://doi.org/10.1111/pace.70127 (note: the article is not open access).