Earl Bakken

Bakken was an electrical engineer who repaired hospital equipment in Minneapolis with his brother-in-law Palmer Hermundslie, in a garage business they called Medtronic from 1949. Working among surgeons gave him the brief for his breakthrough: in 1957 the heart surgeon C. Walton Lillehei asked for a pacemaker that did not depend on mains power, and Bakken built a battery-powered, wearable one in weeks. Turning repair work into a medical device maker meant learning regulation and finance as they went.