Daily Mail: Developing the pacemaker

As the Daily Mail reports:

‘Since their introduction in 1958, pacemakers have helped more than half a million patients with heart disease in the UK alone,’ Dr Osborne explained.

And credit for the device goes to Canadian inventor John Hopps.

Hopps, while training as an engineer at the University of Manitoba, was experimenting with radio frequency heating to restore body temperature.

Swiss researcher Walter Jaeger was trying to create a poison detector when the sensor reacted to his cigarette’s smoke instead
He noticed that if a heart stopped beating due to cooling, it could be restarted through artificial stimulation via mechanical or electronic means.

From there, he went on to develop the pacemaker.