Willem Einthoven (1860-1927) was born May 21, 1860, in Semarang (Java), in the former

Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). His father, born and raised in Groningen (NL), was an
army doctor stationed in the Dutch East Indies, who later become a family physician in
Semarang. His mother was Louise de Vogel, the daughter of a former finance minister in the
Dutch East Indies. Willem was the third of six children. His father died when he was six, and
when he was ten, the family moved back to the Netherlands and settled in Utrecht.

Exceptional Abilities
After completing his secondary education, he was admitted to the University of Utrecht, in
his home town, in 1878. He started out as a medical student, presumably planning to follow
in his father's footsteps, but his special talents proved to be in an entirely different field. He
became an assistant to the ophthalmologist Herman Snellen at the renowned
Ooglijdersgasthuis, an eye hospital in Utrecht, but it was with a treatise on the elbow, titled
Quelques remarques sur le mcanisme de l'articulation du coude ("Some Remarks on the
Elbow Joint"), that he first made his name. He went on to work closely with the great
physiologist Franciscus Cornelis Donders, under whom he obtained his doctorate in 1885,
with a thesis entitled Stereoscopie door kleurverschil ("Stereoscopy by means of Color
Variation"). One of Einthoven's professors at the time was the physicist C. H. D. Buys Ballot,
who discovered the eponymous meteorological law.

Heart Arrhythmia
After qualifying as a practitioner in 1886, Einthoven was appointed Professor of Physiology
at the University of Leiden, where his research centered on the optics of the human eye. In
1898, he published an article about the accommodation of the eye. His big breakthrough
came when he started measuring and recording the beating of the heart. Heart arrhythmia had
been a known disorder in medicine for several centuries and was considered the cause of
several diseases. By the end of the 19th century, people were realizing that the electric
currents in the heart also played an important role in heart arrhythmia.

Electrocardiogram
The first rudimentary electrocardiogram had already been recorded in 1887, when the British
physiologist Augustus Waller published a record of the heart beat of one of his assistants. He

recorded electrical potentials between the two arms of a patient sitting with his hands in pails
of saline solution to achieve optimal electrical conduction. The resulting voltage fluctuation
turned out to run neatly parallel to the heart beat, but this discovery did not yet have much
practical use. Waller's meter, which was based on the level of a delicate column of mercury
did not record the heart 's muscular activity directly. The actual correlation between the lines
on the paper and the beating heart could only be traced through complex mathematical
equations. This made it very unwieldy for clinical use, in Einthoven's opinion.

String Galvanometer
Einthoven introduced the term electrocardiogram in 1895 at a conference. To perform the sort
of intricate measurements needed, he had to modify the instruments then in use. In 1900 he
invented the string galvanometer to do away with all the mathematical corrections. It
consisted of a thin conductive filament between strong electromagnets and was much more
sensitive and flexible than previous galvanometers. Einthoven made the filament for his
string galvanometer himself by drawing out a filament of semi-molten glass and firing it
through the air with a bow and arrow, then silver-coating the resulting strand. It was only
later that he discovered that something similar already existed and was being used as a
receiver for Morse code signals.

Telelectrocardiogram
It would take until 1910 before it became possible to actually record this electrical current
with the help of the first electrocardiograph. That first machine was so big that it would not
fit next to a patient's bed. Instead, doctors had to connect the patient to the machine through
telephonic transmission. The resulting recording made with this set-up was thus called a
telelectrocardiogram. In 1924 the somewhat shy Einthoven was awarded a Nobel prize for his
work; it was the first, and to this date only, prize in medicine won by a Dutch person.

Heart Films
Within two decades the electrocardiogram was an indispensable part of cardiac medicine.
The heart films, as the white-on-black recordings quickly came to be called, revealed so
much about ailments of the heart that it became almost impossible to do without that
measurement technology. German and British companies started producing Einthoven's
machine on a wider scale. A century later, taking an ECG is an everyday routine at the
cardiologist's. The equipment is compact and digital, and in addition to the two electrodes on
the arms, there are six other electrodes that get attached to the chest. To this day it is the
electrical activity that best divulges what is going on inside the heart muscle.