People tend to remember only the dramatic discoveries and inventions, such as penicillin, the telephone and the automobile. These are without a doubt huge inventions/discoveries, crucial ones, and thank the Lord for them, but life would be hard indeed without some apparently less spectacular discoveries as well, such as the compass, the flush toilet, matches and anesthesia, to quote just a very few examples. We discovered fire a long time ago, but imagine having to rub two stones together every time you needed a cuppa tea. Or having your tonsils removed without anesthesia, let’s not even think of amputations or anything else. I mean come on, life without the flush toilet…doesn’t bear thinking, right? Yet there are many millions of people today who live without toilets.
It may come as a relief however to know that this write-up will not be focusing on flushes, although it has drawn attention, hopefully, to how miserable life would be without them. Instead, let’s go with the pacemaker, the little gadget that connects to the heart and ensures that the heart beats at a regular, safe rate.
Pacemakers have come a long way and are very much in use now since they were first invented in the 1960s by the Canadian John Hopps. The first one was used in 1962 to help 72-year-old Mr Hintzman with his erratic heart, one that would beat either too slowly or stop altogether.
That first pacemaker looked like a small radio, was about 30cm long and it was powered by a specific household current. Patients hooked onto this would not last half a day in Pakistan, if that, given our erratic power supply.
Today people go about their daily lives with pacemakers inside them, there are no tubes, wires or anything else to tell that there is one there. Other delicate surgery too is performed with the aid of instruments using microchips and patients are able to lead a much more normal lives subsequently thanks to them
Pacemakers matured to implantable ones in the 1970s, but they could only be set to one heart rate, lasted just a couple of years after which the four lithium batteries had to be replaced, and they could not store data which meant that if the heart became better or worse there was no easy way to find out.
Today’s pacemakers are about the size of a small pencil sharpener, the battery lasts six to ten years, it also stores data and it is adjustable to the required heart rate as indicated thanks to that data.
What makes these new pacemakers and many other things which are indispensable to life today possible is a little thing called a microchip, the real hero today.
Think a little gizmo about the size of your fingernail, that is a microchip. That pert little thing is one of the most important inventions in the world today.
An article in ThoughtCo. by Mary Bellis tells you about the microchip.
The people who invented the microchip were two Americans, Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce. They’re built layer by layer on a wafer of semiconductor material, like silicon. Chemicals, gas and light are used to build the layers. Delicate computer circuitry called an integrated circuit is etched upon these layers. It is this tiny piece of something that powers almost everything today, from spacecraft to phones, tracking systems, televisions, bank cards, the above-mentioned pacemakers, other medical devices, and of course once again the ubiquitous toilet. Yes, there is a toilet that contains a microchip which shuts off water in the commode if it threatens to overflow, and hear this, there is now another one developed in Japan that makes intelligent deductions based on the user’s daily contributions to the bowl and automatically sends information to the person’s GP. So if your doctor knows you have diabetes you know who’s been talking.
If we’re grateful for the telephone today, remember it too has come a long way from the telephones made of Bakelite that were plugged into a certain spot and could not be used anywhere but at that spot. No Google, folks, no GPS, no using it in the car and definitely no placing one in your pocket or bag. All those changes came about, thanks to microchips.
Today people go about their daily lives with pacemakers inside them, there are no tubes, wires or anything else to tell that there is one there. Other delicate surgery too is performed with the aid of instruments using microchips and patients are able to lead a much more normal lives subsequently thanks to them.
Most lately in Canada a chip has been developed that once it is installed in the brain, can interact with brain cells, detect seizures and treat people with neurological diseases. The two people involved in this research have been Colin Dalton of Canada and Naveed Syed, also Canadian but originally from Pakistan.
It’s people like these, and Kilby, Noyce and Bill Gates who have made all this possible.
The world would have been a much harder place without them.
