Earl E. Bakken, who, working in a Minneapolis garage, invented the first wearable, battery-powered pacemaker and went on to help create the world’s largest medical device company, died on Sunday at his home in Hawaii. He was 94.
His death, near Kiholo Bay in the North Kona District of the Big Island, was announced by Medtronic, the company he and a brother-in-law founded in 1949 when Mr. Bakken was a 25-year-old electrical engineering student.
The partnership got off to a slow start. Originally conceived as a repair shop for hospitals’ electronic equipment, Medtronic made $8 in its first month in business. But following a blackout in the Twin Cities in 1957, a young surgeon asked Mr. Bakken if he could make a pacemaker that would not be dependent on the hospital’s power supply. Mr. Bakken fashioned a small, battery-powered device, basing the circuit on a design for a metronome that he had found in a back issue of Popular Electronics magazine.
That innovation, along with an implantable pacemaker that Medtronic licensed from its inventors a few years later, provided the foundation for what is today a medical devices giant with nearly $30 billion in annual revenue. Besides pacemakers, the company also manufactures coronary stents, insulin pumps and surgical equipment, among other products.
Mr. Bakken led the company for 40 years, stepping down as chairman in 1989. He retired from its board in 1994.
“He was a futurist in every sense of the word,” said Darrel Untereker, a friend of Mr. Bakken’s who retired from Medtronic as vice president of research and technology this year after 42 years at the company. “He was always looking forward.”
Mr. Bakken in about 1950 working in the Minneapolis garage where Medtronic started. It made $8 in its first month in business.CreditMedtronic
Earl Elmer Bakken was born on Jan. 10, 1924, in Minneapolis and grew up in nearby Columbia Heights, Minn. His father, Osval Bakken, a son of Norwegian immigrants, was a clerk for a farm implement supply company. His mother, Florence (Hendricks) Bakken, was secretary of their Lutheran church.
Mr. Bakken became fascinated with electricity after seeing the 1931 movie “Frankenstein” when he was 8 years old.
“What intrigued me the most, as I sat through the movie again and again, was not the monster’s rampages, but the creative spark of Dr. Frankenstein’s electricity,” Mr. Bakken wrote in a 1999 autobiography, “One Man’s Full Life.” “Through the power of his wildly flashing laboratory apparatus, the doctor restored life to the unliving.”
Encouraged by his mother, he became an avid tinkerer, taking apart the family radio, stringing a telephone line across the street to a friend’s house and assembling an Erector Set robot that puffed hand-rolled cigarettes. (As a teenager he invented what he called a Kiss-O-Meter, to measure the emotional strength of a kiss.)
After graduating from high school, Mr. Bakken enlisted in the Army, serving as a radar instructor in Florida. After the war, he attended the University of Minnesota on the G.I. Bill, earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and starting on a master’s in the field.
While in graduate school, Mr. Bakken made friends at Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, now called Abbott Northwestern Hospital, where his wife at the time, Constance L. Bakken, was a medical technologist. Knowing his technical prowess, doctors began asking Mr. Bakken to help them fix electronic equipment.
It was Palmer J. Hermundslie, Mr. Bakken’s brother-in-law, who suggested turning his Mr.-Fix-It sideline into a proper business. (Mr. Hermundslie was married to Mr. Bakken’s wife’s sister.) The two started Medtronic in 1949, initially working out of a boxcar-turned-garage owned by Mr. Hermundslie’s family. Mr. Bakken had modest expectations.
“Whatever Palmer had in mind regarding the future, I figured I’d be completing my master’s work at the U. of M., maybe going on to get my doctorate, then either teaching or settling down at that quiet research bench at Honeywell,” Mr. Bakken wrote in his autobiography.
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The business grew slowly. In addition to repairing equipment, Medtronic began making its own, mostly custom devices designed in response to requests from local doctors and technicians. One such doctor was C. Walton Lillehei, who had developed a surgical technique to help infants born with congenital heart defects (and who went to become a pioneer in open-heart surgery). His patients often required pacemakers, which at the time were bulky collections of vacuum tubes that had to be plugged into the wall.
Medtronic’s big break began with a sad event. In 1957, a blackout hit Minneapolis, knocking out power to Dr. Lillehei’s hospital and leading to the death of one of his young patients. He asked Mr. Bakken if he could find a better solution.
Mr. Bakken at first experimented with powering a pacemaker with an automobile battery. Deeming that too bulky, he turned instead to what at the time was a new technology: the transistor. Mr. Bakken’s invention fit in a four-inch-square box, which could be taped to a patient’s chest. The pacemaker transmitted electric signals to the heart through wires that passed through the patient’s chest, and which could be removed without surgery.
Dr. Lillehei installed a prototype on a patient less than four weeks after Mr. Bakken began his work — a time frame that he later noted would be impossible under modern regulations.
Mr. Bakken’s invention transformed Medtronic — but not right away. The company sold only a few dozen pacemakers in 1957 and 1958. In 1960, however, the company licensed the rights to an implantable pacemaker that had been invented by researchers in Buffalo. The next year, the company finally moved out of its garage into a newly built headquarters nearby. Revenues, which were barely $500,000 in 1962, hit nearly $10 million by 1968.
Mr. Bakken was also a philanthropist who focused on science education and medicine. In 1975, he founded the Bakken Museum in Minneapolis, which is dedicated to the history of electricity and magnetism. He also helped found the Pavek Museum in nearby St. Louis Park; it houses a collection of antique radio, television and broadcast equipment. He funded several medical programs at the University of Minnesota as well as the Earl and Doris Bakken Heart-Brain Institute at the Cleveland Clinic.
Mr. Bakken’s first marriage, to Connie Olson, as she was known, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Doris (Marshall) Bakken, whom he married in 1982; four children from his first marriage, Wendy Watson, Pamela Petersmeyer and Jeff and Bradley Bakken; his sister, Marjorie Andersen; two stepchildren, Ramona West and David Marshall; 11 grandchildren; three step-grandchildren; and eight step-great-grandchildren.
Mr. Bakken was a direct beneficiary of his invention, having pacemakers implanted in himself twice.
“So I’m glad I invented the company,” Mr. Bakken told the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 2010, “or I wouldn’t be sitting here.”