The first Friday Failure of the New Year comes from the heart. Not mine, but someone’s, I’m sure. It’s a little ditty about how a simple mistake sometimes can show us something we never expected. From MIT (yes, that MIT):
After earning a BS (Cornell) and MSEE (University of Buffalo), and after serving with the Navy in World War II, Wilson Greatbatch began working in medical research. One afternoon in the late 1950s, he was inspired by a mistake to invent one of the most significant medical devices of all time: the implantable cardiac pacemaker.
Greatbatch was building an oscillator to record heart sounds. When he accidentally installed a resistor with the wrong resistance into the unit, it began to give off a steady electrical pulse. Greatbatch realized that the small device could be used to regulate the human heart. After two years of refinements, he had hand-crafted the world’s first successful implantable pacemaker (patent #3,057,356). Until that time, the apparatus used to regulate heartbeat was the size of a television set, and painful to use.
All Wilson was trying to do was record sound, instead he improved and prolonged the lives of millions of people. Mistakes are about learning. It’s how we grow and improve. If we can keep our mind open and sharp enough when we make our mistakes, we can often surge ahead with the new information we learned from our failure.
Good thing mistakes happen every day for most of us!
January 11, 2008 at 10:12 am |
Hi there,
Mistakes are fine as long as they don’t kill you and if you don’t do them again and again. I mean it is always easy to say sorry and call it quits if it is a simple mistake.
January 11, 2008 at 11:31 am |
I am highly thankful for this mistake, as it is currently keeping my 86 year old Grandmother ticking.