(c) 2026 David Prutchi and Daniel Villamil. All rights reserved
I’m pleased to share that our paper has now been published 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.
A read-only, full-text version is available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/YFUMNTB3P4YUS3WFCNJ7?target=10.1111/pace.70127