The Mysterious Fate of Hyman's Pacemaker

The first artificial pacemaker: the best thing since sliced bread?

“…Hyman claimed that his machine had produced extrasystoles shown on electrocardiography, but modern reanalysis of the tracings has not confirmed this. Scrutiny of all the available technical date on his three machines has led modern cardiologists to reach the conclusion that “output stimuli were long and of low amplitude and would probably have been unable to evoke a cardiac response in human beings.’6 Any evidence that the machine actually worked must therefore be regarded as inconclusive at best. A battery-driven replica built in the 1990s on the basis of Hyman’s patent application and diagrams looks splendid, like some Heath Robinson contraption, (see figure 1) but it was never clinically tested.…”

“…This apparently included an incident of restoring consciousness to a man suffering a Stokes-Adams attack. If that was the case, the device would indeed have qualified as pacemaker in the modern sense, although the account contains inconsistencies regarding the timing and the people involved 6. In addition, Hyman and his colleagues had inserted the needle into the right atrium as before, which presumably could not have been effective if the diagnosis had been one of complete atrioventricular block.…”

Reconstruction of Hyman's Second Pacemaker

“…Neither the patent nor the subsequent manuscript provided sufficient information about the stimuli to allow comparison with what is now understood, to conclude whether they could actually stimulate the heart 8,9 . The published ECGs do not persuade (S. Furman) that a cardiac response actually occurred in response to a stimulus 10,12 …”

“…Though Hyman himself had claimed, during newspaper interviews, that the three different pacemakers of his design had, successively existed, photographs of only two pacemakers exist (above). A high quality black and white photograph (and only the photograph) was in the possession of the Bakken museum (The Bakken Library and Museum, Minneapolis, MN), and thought to have been made in Germany and to date from later during the 1930s decade 12 . The photograph allowed consideration of reconstruction of a replica of the “second” pacemaker so that the loan of one and the NASPE exhibition of the other would be possible.…”

“…8,9 The published ECGs do not persuade (S. Furman) that a cardiac response actually occurred in response to a stimulus. 10,12 Three different models of the Hyman artificial pacemaker were purported to have been designed and constructed during the 1930s, none survives. A photograph remains showing the version that Hyman and his brother built in New York.…”