Pacemaker
In the late 1950s Wilson Greatbatch, a University of Buffalo Professor, was working with cardiologists to find a way to record human heart sounds. While constructing an experimental machine for this purpose, he decided he needed to install a current regulating device. It was an easy mistake to make and the color codes on the tiny electrical components were almost identical: brown/black/orange for the type he was after, brown/black/green for the one he selected.
Once he had installed the ‘wrong’ resistor, Greatbatch checked the circuit. There was a pulse, then a second’s silence, then another pulse. It sounded just like a heartbeat. “he said ‘wait a minute this is a pacemaker!” the inventor later said.
The next task he wanted to do was to shrink the new machine and make it smaller. So greatbatch went into an old barn to solve the problem how to reduce an electronic appliance to
the size of a kitchen cabinet to the size of a baby’s hand, in order to be able to implant this pacemaker in the chest. Within two years, he had come up with the world’s first implantable cardiac pacemaker. He filed a US patent application for the device on July 22, 1960. After he had almost finished the job, he invented a battery to power it.
Greatbatch, who was born in 1919 and has been awarded. More than 150 American patents, was inducted into the Inventors’ Hall of Fame in 1986.
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My final copy
What he was trying to make: Hopps was conducting research on hypothermia and was trying to use radio frequency heating to restore body temperature.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/these-10-inventions-were-made-by-mistake-2010-11?op=1#ixzz2TZ3nMQCI
http://www.cpaglobal.com/newlegalreview/2917/accidental_inventions_the_pacemaker
