Canada 2011 Canadian Innovation - The Pacemaker

The Canadian Post issued on 17 August 2011, a set of 4 stamps on the theme of Canadian innovations. One stamp, shown on the left, features the pacemaker, designed and built by Canadian electrical engineer John Hopps in 1950 based upon observations by cardio-thoracic surgeon Wilfred Gordon Bigelow at Toronto General Hospital. This initial is very big machine using vacuum tube technology to provide transcutaneous pacing for the heart, it was somewhat crude and painful to the patient in use and, being powered from an AC wall socket, carried a potential hazard of electrocution of the patient by inducing ventricular fibrillation.

The development of the silicon transistor and its first commercial availability in 1956 was the pivotal event which led to rapid development of practical cardiac pacemaking. In 1958, American engineer Earl Bakken of Minneapolis, Minnesota, produced the first wearable external pacemaker. This transistorised pacemaker, housed in a small plastic box, had controls to permit adjustment of pacing heart rate and output voltage and was connected to electrode leads which passed through the skin of the patient to terminate in electrodes attached to the surface of the myocardium of the heart. The first clinical implantation into a human of a fully implantable pacemaker was in 1958 at the Karolinska Institute in Solna, Sweden, using a pacemaker designed by Rune Elmqvist and surgeon Åke Senning, connected to electrodes attached to the myocardium of the heart by thoracotomy. The device failed after three hours. A second device was then implanted which lasted for two days. The world's first implantable pacemaker patient, Arne Larsson, went on to receive 26 different pacemakers during his lifetime. He died in 2001, at the age of 86, outliving the inventor as well as the surgeon.