Today, Google is celebrating what might have been the 159th birthday of Willem Einthoven with an special Doodle.
Willem Einthoven, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his pioneering work in recording the heart’s electrical action, would have celebrated his 159th birthday today.
His invention of the electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG) is being marked with a Google Doodle portraying the doctor hooked up to one of his machines.
Its initial incarnations required the patient to plunge two hands and one foot into buckets of salt solution.
The gadget at that point delivered moving follow on chart paper, monitoring the rhythm of the heart as it pumps blood around the body.
Einthoven was very much aware of the potential advantages of the his disclosure, writing in 1906 that it would help doctors “to give relief to the suffering of our patients.”
Throughout the years the ECG turned out to be a lot littler and observed the heart’s activity utilizing electrodes placed on the patient’s limbs and chest.
The ECG recording is currently best known as the dancing green speck on a computer monitor, joined by a customary blaring noise of the kind used for the theme tune of the BBC TV show Casualty.
Einthoven, the child of a doctor, was born on 21 May 1860 in Indonesia (at that point the Dutch East Indies).
His family came back to the Netherlands when he was as yet a boy and he went on to study medicine in Utrecht.
He began his work on the electrical currents of the heart in 1895 and received his Nobel Prize “for the discovery of the mechanism of the electrocardiogram” in 1924. Einthoven died three years later.