Accidental Inventions: The History of X-Rays and Implantable Pacemakers

“Failure is a learning experiment, and the guy who has never failed has never done anything” - Wilson Greatbatch

Every day, hundreds of thousands of people are put through some sort of medical scanning equipment. From minimal bone fractures to fluid in the lungs and cancerous cells, X-rays have quickly changed the world of medicine. But how many of these hundreds of thousands of patients, and even medical professionals, wonder how X-rays came to be, or even what the ‘X’ stands for? I am willing to bet it's close to zero. 

X-rays were one of the inventions that were not meant to be established, or at least that was the case at the time of its discovery. In 1897, scientist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, was performing his daily research to understand if cathode rays, which were later developed into Television, could pass through glass. This is when “he noticed a glow coming from a nearby chemically coated screen” (Harrah, 2014). Through further experimentation, Rontgen realized that the rays could also reveal what’s underneath
human skin. Not knowing the nature of these rays, Röntgen named them “X-Rays” (surprisingly, no unique abbreviation here). 

Röntgen’s accidental discovery of X-rays was “labeled a medical miracle and X-rays soon became an important diagnostic tool in medicine, allowing doctors to see inside the human body for the first time without surgery” (History.com Editors, 2009). Soon after, industries started to utilize this new technology for massive streams, like identifying broken bones and bullets in military personnel. 

Fast forward to 1904, some red flags were raised as the dangers of x-rays on the human body came to light. Skin cancer was one of the identified consequences of continued use of X-rays. In this case, scientists and organizations were quick to realize and take advantage of this innovation, but slower to identify and fully understand the risks and potential harm X-rays may pose. This comes to show that the economical and medical advantages that were identified due to this innovation, which are both major forces, shadowed the additional research that was necessary to ensure the safety of X-ray users and patients. After about 50 years of X-rays being used for almost anything an organization could think of, such as helping people find the perfect shoe fit for the shape of their feet bones, X-rays became reserved only for medical use. 


Soon after the X-rays were reserved strictly for medical use, in 1956 came another accidental invention that changed and saved millions of people’s lives. This invention is known as the heartbeat regular, or rather, the Implantable Pacemaker. Dr. Wilson Greatbatch was an adjunct professor at the University of Buffalo, school of engineering. While he was building a tool to record heart rhythm, he accidentally placed the wrong transistor in his tool. The transistor caused a wrong resistance, causing the unit to “give off a steady electrical pulse” (Lemelson, n.d.). Realizing what that meant, Dr. Greatbatch then spent two years refining his accidental innovation, which soon became the first implantable pacemaker. 

Dr. Greatbatch then partnered with surgeon William Chardack to test this technology on a dog’s heart, and to no surprise, it successfully controlled the dog’s heartbeat. In 1960, the first pacemaker was implanted in a human patient, helping regulate their heartbeat to mimic a normal human’s rhythm. 

These accidental inventions come to prove that it doesn’t require a subject matter expert of a specific field to expand on current technologies or solutions. Rather, a large number of innovations dwelled from customers that took a current solution and expanded it to meet their needs, as in the example of mountain bikes. Other inventions, like those discussed here, were accidentally recognized by engineers and scientists after making some sort of an error throughout their experimentation. 

References 
Harrah, S. (2014, November 5). Medical Milestones: Invention of the X-Ray. UNIVERSITY OF MEDICINE AND HEALTH SCIENCES. Retrieved September 2, 2022, from https://www.umhs-sk.org/blog/medical-milestones-invention-x-ray 
History.com Editors. (2009, November 24). German scientist discovers X-rays. HISTORY. Retrieved September 2, 2022, from http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/german-scientist-discovers- x-rays 
Lemelson. (n.d.). Wilson Greatbatch | Lemelson. Lemelson N-MIT. Retrieved September 2, 2022, from https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/wilson-greatbatch#:%7E:text=In%201970%2C%20Wilson%20Greatbatch%20founded,of%20millions%20of%20people%20worldwide./

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