Innovative Tuesday: The Invention of the Pacemaker

     Hello everybody and welcome back to another edition of Nations Made Fun! I'll be your host, Mr. Nations, your tour guide to this massive world we all call home! Today on Innovative Tuesday, we'll be taking a look at one of the more influential inventions in the world of medicine, the pacemaker. Well, what are we waiting for? Let's dive straight into it, shall we?

     First, let's discover what a pacemaker actually is. A pacemaker is a little electronic device that simulates the average speed of a human heartbeat, making it so that the human heart will match the speed of the pacemaker. Pacemakers are used all over the world to combat irregular or abnormal heartbeats.

     The first cardiac pacemaker was invented by a Canadian electrical engineer named John Hopps. He found that if the heart stopped beating when its temperature dropped, that it could be restarted artificially, using mechanical or electrical stimulation to make it beat. Hopps used these advancements to start a dog’s heart in 1949. Modern pacemakers are based off the basic ones used by Hopps.

     The first pacemaker:
     
     Sources: http://www.animalresearch.info/en/medical-advances/timeline/cardiac-pacemakers