Who is Willem Einthoven, the chief scientist that Google honored with a doodle

With one of his typical scribbles, Google celebrated Tuesday the birth of the Dutchman who devoted his life to study the human heart: Nobel prize Willem Einthoven.

The physiologist, born in 1860 in the Dutch colony of Java (now Indonesia), was one of the pioneers of the electrocardiography, a quick, painless and effective method for studying heart rhythms and diagnose cardiovascular disease.

Since his childhood, Einthoven wanted to follow the footsteps of his father, who was a doctor and a military doctor. At the age of 26, focused on optics, breathing and the heart, he became professor of physiology at the University of Leiden.

In 1889, Einthoven attended the first International Congress of Physiologists, where he attended the demonstration of a device called "Lippmann capillary electrometer", which records the electrical activity of the human heart. After badyzing the results, Einthoven recognized the need for more accurate device and started working on his galvanometer with rope, based on the technology used to amplify the signals along the submarine cables.

By balancing a thin silver-coated quartz chain between the two poles of a magnet, Einthoven's invention made it possible to accurately measure the variations in electrical current. In 1901, he announced the first version of the galvanometer and soon published the first electrocardiogram or ECG of the world, a printed record of a human heartbeat.

Einthoven studied the ECG patterns, identified five "deviations" from the normal heart functionand learned to interpret deviations indicating circulatory problems and heart disease.

Einthoven's innovative research led him to win the prize Nobel Prize in Medicine 1924. Today, ECG devices are still used in hospitals all over the world and, although the technology has evolved considerably, they continue to operate according to the same basic principles and techniques developed by him. electrocardiography modern