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In 1924, the Nobel Prize in medicine was given to Willem Einthoven for his work on the EKG machine. But he, as many in science, built on the works of those who came before him. Einthoven won the award in 1924, but the Nobel committee did its usual speedy job and saluted work done in 1901. Einthoven’s innovation was built on the movement of a thread of crystal stretched between two electromagnets. This gave new sensitivity to the test, making it much more useful as a diagnostic tool.

Einthoven technology was built on a device called a Lippmann capillary electrometer. It had a column of mercury suspended beneath a strong acid solution. Electrodes were then attached to the mercury end and the acid end of the column. The column of mercury would move in direct relation to the amount of electricity passing through the mercury/acid column.

This detector had been in existence since the 1850’s, but it had little use in medicine, and was a curiosity at best. The very first real time EKG was done by August Waller. In 1887, Dr. Waller took an Lippmann capillary electrometer, and combined it with a new technology: photographic film. He passed a beam of light across the column of mercury in the Lippmann capillary electrometer. The light then hit a moving photographic plate. When the tiny electrical charges made the mercury column move up and down, it alternatively blocked and exposing a track on the moving plate. Thus the first recognizable EKG tracing was produced when this machine was attached to a patient.

Dr. Waller is rightly credited with the first EKG machine, but as late as 1911, he saw little practical use for it. It was the innovation of Dr. Einthoven that made the machine sensitive enough to be diagnostic. And it is Dr. Einthoven that took the new technology farther, defining the data his machine produced with terms that are still in use today.

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