Health History | Medtronic — The Boxcar Garage at 818 19th Avenue Northeast
· 1949-4
Unreviewed contributionBy kevin · · updated · Report an issue
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Health History | Medtronic — The Boxcar Garage at 818 19th Avenue Northeast
kevin
People treat Medtronic as a campus on Medtronic Parkway that arrived already making implantable devices.
The first shop was a converted garage behind a family house in northeast Minneapolis.
On 29 April 1949 Earl Bakken, a University of Minnesota electrical-engineering graduate student, and his brother-in-law Palmer Hermundslie formed a partnership to repair hospital electronics. They named the firm Medtronic, a contraction of medical and electronic.
The shop stood at 818 19th Avenue Northeast, in the Logan Park neighborhood. The building was two railroad boxcars the Hermundslie family had used as a garage.
The first month's recorded revenue was eight dollars in 1949, for repairing one centrifuge. Radio and television side jobs kept the partners fed while they sold Sanborn equipment and built custom devices for local physicians.
The load-bearing moment came eight years later. Existing external pacemakers were cart-sized boxes plugged into wall current. On Halloween night in 1957 a Minneapolis power cut threatened open-heart patients at the University of Minnesota who depended on those machines.
C. Walton Lillehei, the surgeon who pioneered the operations, asked Bakken for a battery-powered unit. Bakken adapted a metronome circuit published in Popular Electronics, changed the voltage to match a human heartbeat, and delivered a prototype in about four weeks.
The first wearable transistor pacemaker was housed in aluminum and intended for animal tests. University clinicians used it on patients within days. A refined 5800 model in white plastic followed in 1958 as Medtronic's commercial wearable unit.
The garage itself is gone. The lot is an ordinary Northeast address. What remains is the street and the fact that a repair shop of two boxcars became the company that still runs its operational headquarters in the Twin Cities.
Photo: Fibonacci Blue, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The frame is Logan Park, the neighborhood that held the garage.
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