Earl Elmer Bakken was an American engineer, businessman and philanthropist of Dutch and Norwegian American ancestry. He founded Medtronic, where he developed the first external, battery-operated, transistorized, wearable artificial pacemaker in 1957.
Sensing an opportunity, with his brother-in-law, Palmer Hermundslie, he formed Medtronic in a small garage, primarily working with the University of Minnesota hospital. In the 1950s, Dr. C. Walton Lillehei 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. Lillehei's young patients died. Dr. Lillehei, who had worked with Bakken before, asked him the next day if he could solve the problem. Four weeks after finding a circuit diagram for a metronome in Popular Electronics, Bakken delivered a battery-powered transistorized pacemaker about the size of a few decks of cards to Dr. Lillehei. After successfully testing the hand-made device in the laboratory, Bakken returned to create a refined model for patients. However, much to his 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 worked with other doctors to develop fully implantable pacemakers, but they also veered toward bankruptcy. He borrowed money that kept Medtronic going, but the bankruptcy near-miss drove Bakken to develop the Medtronic Mission, 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 and moved to a 9-acre estate in the Kona District of Hawaii he called Bakken Hale, but still returned to the company several times a year to meet new employees and explain the Medtronic Mission to them in person. In 1996 he helped to dedicate the NorthHawaiiCommunity Hospital and was active there for some time afterwards, working to combine Eastern and Western approaches to medicine to develop a more holistic approach to health care. In 2001, Medtronic started the construction of its new European distribution center in Heerlen, The Netherlands. The street on which the facility was built is named after Bakken. Bakken died at his Hawaii home on October 21, 2018 at the age of 94.
