Tens of millions of individuals worldwide have purpose to be grateful that Swedish engineer Rune Elmqvist determined to not apply medication. Though certified as a physician, he selected to invent medical gear as an alternative. In 1949, whereas working at Elema-Schonander (later Siemens-Elema), in Stockholm, he utilized for a patent for the Mingograph, the primary inkjet printer. Its movable nozzle deposited an electrostatically managed jet of ink droplets on a spool of paper.
Rune Elmqvist certified to be a doctor, however he devoted his profession to creating medical gear, like this galvanometer.Håkan Elmqvist/Wikipedia
Elmqvist demonstrated the Mingograph on the First Worldwide Congress of Cardiology in Paris in 1950. It might file physiological alerts from a affected person’s electrocardiogram or electroencephalogram in actual time, aiding docs in diagnosing coronary heart and mind circumstances. Eight years later, he labored with cardiac surgeon Åke Senning to develop the primary totally implantable pacemaker. So whether or not you’re working paperwork by an inkjet printer or dwelling your greatest life resulting from a pacemaker, give a nod of appreciation to the ingenious Dr. Elmqvist.
The world’s first inkjet printer
Rune Elmqvist was an inquisitive individual. Whereas nonetheless a pupil, he invented a specialised potentiometer to measure pH and a transportable multichannel electrocardiograph. In 1940, he grew to become head of growth on the Swedish medical electronics firm Elema-Schonander.
Earlier than the Mingograph, electrocardiograph machines relied on a writing stylus to hint the waveform on a shifting roll of paper. However friction between the stylus and the paper prevented small modifications within the electrical sign from being precisely recorded. Elmqvist’s preliminary design was a modified oscillograph. Historically, an oscillograph used a mirror to replicate a beam of sunshine (transformed from {the electrical} sign) onto photographic movie or paper. Elmqvist swapped out the mirror for a small, moveable glass nozzle that constantly sprayed a skinny stream of liquid onto a spool of paper. {The electrical} sign electrostatically managed the jet.
The Mingograph was initially used to file electrocardiograms of coronary heart sufferers. It quickly discovered use in lots of different fields.Siemens Healthineers Historic Institute
By eliminating the friction of a stylus, the Mingograph (which the corporate marketed because the Mingograf) was capable of file extra detailed modifications of the heartbeat. The machine had three paper-feed speeds: 10, 25, and 50 millimeters per second. The pace may very well be preset or modified whereas in operation.
An analog enter jack on the Mingograph may very well be used to take measurements from different devices. Researchers in disciplines far afield from medication took benefit of this enter to file stress or sound. Phoneticians used it to look at the acoustic points of speech, and zoologists used it to file birdsongs. All through the second half of the twentieth century, scientists cited the Mingograph of their analysis papers as an instrument for his or her experiments.
At the moment, the Mingograph isn’t that extensively recognized, however the underlying know-how, inkjet printing, is ubiquitous. Inkjets dominate the house printer market, and specialised printers print DNA microarrays in labs for genomics analysis, create electrical traces for printed circuit boards, and rather more, as Phillip W. Barth and Leslie A. Area describe of their 2024 IEEE Spectrum article “Inkjets Are for More Than Just Printing.”
The world’s first implantable pacemaker
Regardless of the affect of the Mingograph on the evolution of printing, it’s arguably not Elmqvist’s most essential innovation. The Mingograph helped docs diagnose coronary heart circumstances, nevertheless it couldn’t save a affected person’s life by itself. One in every of Elmqvist’s different innovations might and did: the primary totally implantable, rechargeable pacemaker.
The primary implantable pacemaker [left] from 1958 had batteries that wanted to be recharged as soon as every week. The 1983 pacemaker [right] was programmable, and its batteries lasted a number of years.Siemens Healthineers Historic Institute
Like many tales within the historical past of know-how, this one was pushed into fruition on the urging of a girl, on this case Else-Marie Larsson. Else-Marie’s 43-year-old husband, Arne, suffered from scarring of his coronary heart tissue resulting from a viral an infection. His coronary heart beat so slowly that he continually misplaced consciousness, a situation often called Stokes-Adams syndrome. Else-Marie refused to just accept his dying sentence and looked for another. After studying a newspaper article about an experimental implantable pacemaker being developed by Elmqvist and Senning on the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, she determined that her husband could be the proper candidate to check it out, despite the fact that it had been tried solely on animals up till that time.
Exterior pacemakers—that’s, units exterior the physique that regulated the center beat by making use of electrical energy—already existed, however they had been heavy, cumbersome, and uncomfortable. One early mannequin plugged straight right into a wall socket, so the person risked electrical shock.
By comparability, Elmqvist’s pacemaker was sufficiently small to be implanted within the physique and posed no shock danger. Absolutely encased in an epoxy resin, the disk-shaped gadget had a diameter of 55 mm and a thickness of 16 mm—the size of the Kiwi Shoe Polish tin wherein Elmqvist molded the primary prototypes. It used silicon transistors to tempo a pulse with an amplitude of two volts and length of 1.5 milliseconds, at a fee of 70 to 80 beats per minute (the common grownup coronary heart fee).
The pacemaker ran on two rechargeable 60-milliampere-hour nickel-cadmium batteries organized in sequence. A silicon diode related the batteries to a coil antenna. A 150-kilohertz radio loop antenna exterior the physique charged the batteries inductively by the pores and skin. The cost lasted a couple of week, nevertheless it took 12 hours to recharge. Think about having to remain put that lengthy.
In 1958, over 30 years earlier than this photograph, Arne Larsson [right] obtained the primary implantable pacemaker, developed by Rune Elmqvist [left] at Siemens-Elema. Åke Senning [center] carried out the surgical procedure.Sjöberg Bildbyrå/ullstein bild/Getty Photographs
Else-Marie’s persuasion and persistence pushed Elmqvist and Senning to maneuver from animal exams to human trials, with Arne as their first case examine. Throughout a secret operation on 8 October 1958, Senning positioned the pacemaker in Arne’s stomach wall with two leads implanted within the myocardium, a layer of muscle within the wall of the center. The gadget lasted only some hours. However its alternative, which occurred to be the one spare on the time, labored completely for six weeks after which on and off for a number of extra years.
Arne Larsson lived one other 43 years after his first pacemaker was implanted. Proven listed here are 5 of the pacemakers he obtained. Sjöberg Bildbyrå/ullstein bild/Getty Photographs
Arne Larsson clearly was pleased with the development the pacemaker made to his high quality of life as a result of he endured 25 extra operations over his lifetime to exchange every failing pacemaker with a brand new, improved iteration. He managed to survive each Elmqvist and Senning, lastly dying at the age of 86 on 28 December 2001. Due to the technological intervention of his quite a few pacemakers, his coronary heart by no means gave out. His reason for dying was pores and skin most cancers.
At the moment, greater than one million individuals worldwide have pacemakers implanted annually, and an implanted gadget can last as long as 15 years earlier than needing to get replaced. (Some pacemakers within the Eighties used nuclear batteries, which might final even longer, however the radioactive materials was problematic. See “The Unlikely Revival of Nuclear Batteries.”) Moreover, some pacemakers additionally incorporate a defibrillator to shock the center again to a traditional rhythm when it will get too far out of sync. This lifesaving gadget definitely has come a great distance from its humble begin in a shoe polish tin.
Rune Elmqvist’s legacy
Each time I begin researching the article of the month for Past Forward, I by no means know the place the story will take me or the way it would possibly hit dwelling. My dad lived with congestive coronary heart failure for greater than twenty years and completely cherished his pacemaker. He had an awesome relationship along with his technician, Francois, and so they labored collectively to fine-tune the gadget and maximize its advantages. And identical to Arne Larsson, my dad died from an unrelated trigger.
An engineer to the core, he would have delighted in studying concerning the historical past of this implausible invention. And he most likely would have been tickled by the truth that the identical individual additionally invented the inkjet printer. My dad was not a fan of inkjets, however I’m positive he would have drastically admired Rune Elmqvist, who noticed issues that wanted fixing and got here up with elegantly engineered options.
A part of a continuing series taking a look at historic artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of know-how.
An abridged model of this text seems within the September 2025 print situation.
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