Earl Bakken
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Earl Bakken and Palmer Hermundslie founded Medtronic in 1949 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Bakken developed the first wearable artificial pacemaker in 1957 as a result of a fatal problem at the University of Minnesota hospital. Dr. C. Walton Lillihei was performing life-saving surgery on children with blue baby syndrome. That surgery often left the children needing to be temporarily attached to a pacemaker. The pacemakers at the time were large devices that required their own carts and relied on wall current for power.
As a result of a power blackout on October 31, 1957, one of Dr. Lillihei's young patients died. Dr. Lillihei had worked with Bakken before, and asked him the next day if he could solve the problem. Bakken found a circuit diagram for a metronome in Popular Electronics, and a few weeks later, Bakken delivered a battery-powered transistorized pacemaker about the size of a few decks of cards to Dr. Lillihei. The Food and Drug Administration did not start regulating medical devices until 1976, so much to Bakken's astonishment, when he came in the next day, he found the pacemaker already in use on a patient.
Over the next several years, Bakken and Medtronic went on to work with other doctors to develop fully implantable pacemakers, but they also veered toward bankruptcy. Borrowed money kept Medtronic going, but the bankruptcy near-miss drove Bakken to develop the Medtronic Mission [1], which still guides the company. The mission helped the young company to stay focused on areas where it could truly help patients.
Bakken retired from Medtronic in 1989 but still returns to the company several times a year to meet new employees and explain the Medtronic Mission to them in person.
But full retirement was not for Bakken. Instead, in 1996 he helped dedicate the North Hawaii Community Hospital and has been active there ever since, working to combine Eastern and Western approaches to medicine to develop a more holistic approach to health care.
