Category: Inspiration

A single ceramic resistor, no larger than a grain of rice, ruined the circuit. It was the wrong part. By every rule of electrical engineering, the device sitting on the workbench was a failure.

It was supposed to be a recorder. The engineer, a man named Wilson Greatbatch, was trying to build a machine that could listen to the sound of a human heart. He had reached into his tackle box of components, his eyes perhaps tired from the dim light, and pulled out a resistor marked with the wrong color bands.

He soldered it into place. He sealed the connection. He flipped the switch.

The machine did not record. It did not whine with static. Instead, it began to speak.

Blip. Silence. Blip. Silence.

The pulse lasted 1.8 milliseconds. The silence lasted exactly one second. Greatbatch stared at the oscilloscope, watching the green line spike and fall. He was not a doctor; he was an electrical engineer who tinkered in a barn behind his house. But he knew rhythm.

He realized the machine wasn’t listening. It was commanding. The mistake was beating exactly like a human heart.

It was 1956 in upstate New York. Greatbatch was working at an animal behavior farm, fixing instruments and building gadgets. He was an ordinary man with a garden and a family to feed. He had no medical degree and no funding.

But he had seen the alternative.

At the time, “heart block”—a condition where the heart’s electrical signals fail—was a death sentence. The only way to keep a patient alive was a painful, terrifying ordeal. Doctors used external machines the size of televisions, plugged into wall outlets. The electricity had to shock the chest through the skin, leaving burns. It was agony.

Worse, the patients were tethered to the wall. They could not leave the room. And if a summer thunderstorm knocked out the power grid, the machine stopped. The heart stopped. The patient died.

Greatbatch looked at his accidental circuit. It was small enough to hold in his hand. He realized that if he could shrink the battery and seal the unit, this didn’t need to be a machine on a cart. It could go inside the body.

He felt a cold resolve settle over him. He knew he had found the answer. He also knew that nobody would believe him.

In the 1950s, the medical rule was absolute: electronics do not go inside the human body. The logic was sound and fiercely defended by the establishment. The human body is a hostile, salty, wet environment. It corrodes metal in weeks. It rejects foreign objects violently.

Furthermore, batteries of that era were toxic. Putting a chemical power source inside a chest cavity was considered malpractice, if not manslaughter. The “standard of care” was the external machine. It was brutal, but it was understood. To suggest cutting a person open and leaving a machine inside them was seen as reckless science fiction.

This rule protected patients from quackery. It worked—until it met Wilson Greatbatch.

Greatbatch went home. He looked at his savings account. He had $2,000—enough to buy a house in some places, or feed his family for a year or two. It was his safety net.

He didn’t call a committee. He didn’t apply for a grant. He walked out to his barn, cleared a space on his workbench, and took the $2,000. He told his family they would have to grow their own vegetables to save money.

He quit his job. The safety net was gone.

For two years, the barn became his world. The struggle was quiet and monotonous. The problem wasn’t just the circuit; it was the packaging. How do you hide a machine from the body’s immune system?

He tried wrapping the components in electrical tape. The body fluids seeped through. He tried casting them in resin. The resin cracked. Every failure meant money lost, and the $2,000 was draining away like water.

Doctors laughed at him. When he showed his prototype to engineers, they pointed out that batteries would eventually run out. “Then you have to cut the patient open again, Wilson,” they said. “It’s too much risk.”

He kept soldering. The smell of burning rosin and melting tin filled the barn. He worked through the winter, heating the space with a wood stove. He modified the circuit to use less power. He found a new type of mercury battery. He found a surgeon, Dr. William Chardack, who was desperate enough to listen.

They tested the device on a dog. It worked for four hours. Then the body fluids shorted it out.

Greatbatch didn’t stop. He found a way to mold the device in a special epoxy used for boat hulls. He tried again. This time, it worked for days. Then weeks.

The pressure from the medical community remained. They argued that if the device failed, the doctor would be a murderer. Greatbatch argued that without the device, the patient was already dead.

In 1960, the theory faced reality. A 77-year-old man was dying of complete heart block. His heart beat so slowly that his brain was starving for oxygen. The external machines were failing him. There were no other options left.

Greatbatch handed over his device. It looked like a hockey puck wrapped in plastic.

The surgeons opened the man’s chest. They stitched the leads to the heart muscle. They tucked the device into the abdomen and closed the skin.

The room went silent. They waited for the rhythm.

Lub-dub.

The external machine was turned off. The wire was unplugged from the wall.

The man’s heart kept beating.

For the first time in history, a machine completely inside a human body was keeping a person alive. The patient didn’t die that day. He lived for another 18 months, eventually passing away from natural causes unrelated to his heart.

Greatbatch’s accidental resistor had become the implantable pacemaker.

Within years, the “reckless” idea became the gold standard. The device that experts said would kill patients began to save hundreds of thousands of them. Greatbatch didn’t stop there; he spent the next decade inventing a lithium battery that would make the devices last for years instead of months.

He never sought to become a medical tycoon. He held the patent, but he often licensed it in ways that allowed the technology to spread quickly. He was an engineer who solved problems.

Today, millions of people walk the earth with a small device in their chest, keeping time because an engineer in a barn reached for the wrong part, heard a sound, and refused to ignore it.

Sources: The New York Times archives (2011), Smithsonian Magazine (History of the Pacemaker), National Inventors Hall of Fame. Some details summarized.

“If you are working on something that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.” – Steve Jobs, Entrepreneur (1955 – 2011)

(Tom: The really important thing that determines a man’s productive capacity is, can he learn and can he accurately apply what he learns to produce the desired product.)

He had no medical degree. No surgical training. No license of any kind.

And yet, after half an hour with a textbook, he picked up a scalpel and saved the lives of sixteen wounded soldiers.

The wounded arrived just before nightfall in 1951, during the Korean War.

A small South Korean junk eased alongside the HMCS Cayuga, a Canadian destroyer operating off the Korean coast. Inside were guerrilla fighters from a failed commando raid. Some were torn open by shrapnel. One man had a bullet lodged dangerously close to his heart. Another had injuries so severe that amputation was the only chance of survival.

The crew turned instinctively to the ship’s surgeon, a calm, capable man serving under the name Joseph Cyr.

There was only one problem.

He wasn’t Joseph Cyr.

And he wasn’t a doctor.

The man wearing the surgeon’s uniform was Ferdinand Waldo Demara, an American with no medical training whatsoever. Months earlier, he had stolen the real Dr. Joseph Cyr’s identity and credentials and used them to enlist in the Royal Canadian Navy, which was urgently recruiting medical officers for wartime service.

Now his deception had reached its breaking point.

Demara understood the stakes immediately. If he confessed, the wounded men would almost certainly die before help could arrive. If he tried to operate, he could kill them himself.

He chose to operate.

He ordered the crew to prepare the patients for surgery and retreated to his cabin. There, he opened a medical textbook and began reading with ferocious concentration, focusing on wound extraction, chest surgery, and emergency amputation. His entire surgical education lasted about thirty minutes.

Then he walked into the operating room.

Throughout the night, Demara performed one operation after another. He removed shrapnel. He closed deep wounds. He amputated a crushed foot. He extracted a bullet from a man’s chest, working perilously close to the heart. He relied on anatomy diagrams, logic, nerve, and an extraordinary ability to absorb information quickly.

When morning came, every single patient was alive.

The crew believed they had witnessed something close to a miracle and began preparing a recommendation for a commendation. That decision would ultimately expose him.

Ferdinand Demara was no ordinary impostor.

Born in 1921 in Massachusetts, he grew up during the Great Depression, watching his family fall from comfort into hardship. As a teenager, he ran away to join a monastery. When that life no longer suited him, he reinvented himself again and again.

Over the years, Demara successfully passed himself off as a monk, a psychology professor, a prison warden, a lawyer, a cancer researcher, and an engineer. He possessed an exceptional memory, remarkable intelligence, and a keen understanding of institutional behavior. He learned how professionals spoke, how authority sounded, and how confidence discouraged scrutiny.

He lived by two rules: never volunteer unnecessary information, and project certainty at all times.

When Demara joined the Royal Canadian Navy under a stolen identity, no one questioned him. Canada needed doctors. The war accelerated paperwork. His credentials were accepted at face value.

Aboard the Cayuga, Demara improvised constantly. When sailors came to him with ailments, he would excuse himself, sprint to his cabin, consult textbooks, and return with a confident diagnosis. He treated many conditions with penicillin, which was widely used at the time. When the ship’s captain needed teeth extracted, Demara performed the procedure successfully, earning praise for his steady hand.

But it was the night of the guerrillas that sealed his legend.

Ironically, his success led to his exposure. Canadian newspapers praised “Dr. Joseph Cyr” for his heroism. One reader was the real Dr. Cyr’s mother, who knew her son was safely practicing medicine in New Brunswick. She contacted authorities. An investigation followed.

When confronted, Demara collapsed under the pressure. He secluded himself for days, sedated, before finally surrendering.

The Royal Canadian Navy faced embarrassment of its own making. Prosecuting Demara would highlight their failures, so they quietly discharged him, paid him in full, and deported him to the United States without charges.

In 1961, Hollywood dramatized his life in The Great Impostor, starring Tony Curtis. The fame ended Demara’s ability to disappear into new identities, but it also changed how people viewed him.

Years later, when Demara attended a reunion of the Cayuga crew, the sailors welcomed him warmly. They remembered him not as a fraud, but as the man who saved lives when no one else could.

Demara spent his final years as a legitimately ordained hospital chaplain in California. He died in 1982 at age sixty.

The question remains unsettled.

Was Ferdinand Demara a criminal, or was he a hero?

Was he reckless, or was he brilliant under pressure?

Do credentials define competence—or does action?

For sixteen wounded men on a ship in Korean waters, the answer was simple.

He showed up.

He acted.

And they lived.

Everyone knows her as the giggling ’dumb blonde’ from the 1960s who won an Oscar at 23—but almost nobody knows she quietly built a brain science program that’s now taught emotional resilience to 6 million children in 48 countries.

In 1968, when Goldie Hawn appeared on TV covered in body paint and a bikini, giggling her way through comedy sketches as the show’s ditzy blonde, a women’s magazine editor confronted her. “Don’t you feel terrible that you’re playing a dumb blonde?” the editor asked.

“While women are fighting for liberation, you’re reinforcing every stereotype. ”

Goldie’s response was immediate: “I don’t understand that question because I’m already liberated. Liberation comes from the inside.”

At twenty-two, Goldie Hawn understood something that would define her entire life: you don’t have to play by anyone else’s rules to be free. You just have to know who you are. And she did.

Born in Washington, D.C., Goldie grew up training seriously as a ballet dancer—a discipline requiring precision, control, and relentless self-awareness. When she transitioned to comedy, those skills came with her. Her persona on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In was carefully crafted: the giggling go-go dancer delivering punchlines through high-pitched laughter.

She became a 1960s “It Girl” almost overnight. But what looked like spontaneous silliness was actually masterful comedic craft. Her giggle wasn’t random—it was strategic. Her wide-eyed innocence wasn’t naivete—it was performance. She played the dumb blonde so well that people missed the intelligence underneath. And that was exactly the point. In 1969, Goldie won both the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress for Cactus Flower.

She was twenty-three years old. Her film career exploded. But by the late 1970s, Goldie recognized an uncomfortable truth: actresses, no matter how successful, rarely controlled their own narratives.

So she became a producer. In 1980, she co-produced Private Benjamin with friend Nancy Meyers. Studios dismissed it as “too female,“ predicting audiences wouldn’t pay to see a woman’s story about independence. Goldie ignored them.

Private Benjamin became a massive box office hit and earned three Oscar nominations. She continued producing and starring in successful comedies throughout the 1980s and 1990s, crafting characters who laughed at their own pain and weaponized humor against aging and sexism.

But offscreen, something even more remarkable was happening. While her peers chased youth through surgery and desperate career moves, Goldie turned inward. She’d been meditating since the 1970s, long before mindfulness became trendy.

She studied neuroscience, positive psychology, and how the brain works. This wasn’t celebrity dabbling. This was serious, sustained study. And in 2003, it led to what might be Goldie’s most important work.

Alarmed by increases in school violence, youth depression and suicide, Goldie founded The Goldie Hawn Foundation. Working with leading neuroscientists and educators, the foundation developed MindUP—an evidence-based curriculum teaching children social-emotional skills and mindfulness.

MindUP teaches children how their brains work, how to manage stress through “brain breaks,“ how to regulate emotions, build empathy, and develop resilience.

The program is based on actual neuroscience. Research has shown that students using MindUP demonstrate improved focus, increased empathy, better academic performance, and higher levels of optimism.

“If students take two minutes for a brain break three times a day,” Goldie explained, “optimism in the classroom goes up almost 80 percent. ”The program has now served over 6 million children in 48 countries. Read that again: 6 million children.

48 countries. The “dumb blonde” from the 1960s quietly built a global program that’s teaching emotional resilience to millions of kids—many of whom have no idea who Goldie Hawn even is.

This work—sustained, focused on children most people in Hollywood never think about—might be Goldie’s most enduring legacy. Throughout all of this, she’s maintained remarkable stability.

She’s been with Kurt Russell since 1983—over forty years together without marrying. She raised four children who’ve pursued their own careers with her support.

Now in her late seventies, Goldie remains selective about her projects. She took a fifteen-year break from film, returning in 2017 for Snatched with Amy Schumer—who had grown up watching Goldie’s films and wanted to work with her. When asked about ageism in Hollywood, Goldie’s response was characteristically pragmatic: “You think you’re going to fight the system? Anger doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s not productive.”

Instead of fighting battles she couldn’t win, she changed the battlefield. She produced. She built a foundation. She taught millions of children. She lived life on her own terms.

Looking back, Goldie Hawn’s life reveals a consistent pattern: she never let anyone else define her worth. When critics dismissed her as a dumb blonde, she won an Oscar. When Hollywood tried to limit her to acting, she became a producer.

When fame threatened to consume her, she turned to meditation and neuroscience. When she saw children struggling, she built a global program to help them.

The giggle that made her famous was never the whole story. It was the disguise that let her do everything else. Goldie Hawn proved that you don’t have to shout to be powerful. You don’t have to reject femininity to be feminist.

And you don’t have to choose between success and substance—you can have both, as long as you know who you are. She smiled her way through a system designed to limit her, then quietly built an empire that had nothing to do with that system’s approval.

6 million children in 48 countries have learned emotional resilience from a program created by the woman America knew as the giggling blonde in a bikini. That’s not just a career. That’s a masterclass in playing the long game.

Because the greatest act of resistance isn’t fighting the stereotype. It’s using it as cover while you do the real work. And Goldie Hawn has been doing the real work for more than fifty years.

(Tom: We all owe this being a debt of thanks!)

He discovered how old the Earth was. Then he discovered something that could destroy us all.

For thousands of years, humanity wondered about the age of our planet. Religious texts offered one answer. Philosophers debated another. Scientists made educated guesses based on fossils and rock layers. But nobody actually knew.

Until a quiet scientist named Clair Patterson figured it out in 1953.

He should have become instantly famous. His name should have appeared in every textbook. Instead, what he discovered next turned him into a target. He found himself standing alone against one of the most powerful industries on Earth, fighting a battle that would determine whether millions of children would grow up with damaged minds.

And for decades, almost nobody knew his name.

Patterson’s journey began in the late 1940s at the University of Chicago. He was a young geochemist with an impossible assignment: measure the precise amount of lead isotopes in a meteorite fragment called Canyon Diablo.

The theory was elegant—if he could measure these specific lead ratios accurately, he could calculate when the solar system formed, and therefore, when Earth was born.

But there was a problem that nearly broke him.

Every time he tried to measure the lead in his samples, the numbers were wildly inconsistent. One day high, the next day higher, never stable. His equipment seemed fine. His calculations were correct. Yet the data was chaos.

Most scientists would have given up or blamed the methodology. Patterson was different. He possessed an almost obsessive attention to detail and patience that bordered on stubborn madness.

One day, he realized something shocking: the problem wasn’t his rock sample. The problem was everything else.

There was lead everywhere. On the lab benches. In the air. Tracking in on people’s shoes. Floating as invisible dust particles. The entire world was contaminated, and it was sabotaging his measurements.

So Patterson did something unprecedented. He built the world’s first ultra-clean laboratory.

He scrubbed every surface until his hands bled. He sealed cracks in walls with tape. He installed specialized air filters. He made his assistants wear protective suits and wash repeatedly before entering. For years, he cleaned and refined and eliminated every possible source of contamination.

Finally, in 1953, he achieved it. He got a clean reading. He ran the numbers through a mass spectrometer, performed the calculations, and suddenly held an answer that no human in history had ever known:

4.55 billion years.

The Earth was 4.55 billion years old.

It’s said that in his excitement, he drove straight to his mother’s house in Iowa and told her he’d solved one of humanity’s oldest mysteries. The weight of not knowing had finally lifted.

But while building his clean room, Patterson had stumbled onto something far more disturbing.

Where was all this lead coming from?

Lead is naturally rare on Earth’s surface. It stays locked deep underground in mineral deposits. It doesn’t float freely in the air. It doesn’t coat laboratory tables. Yet it was everywhere—in quantities that made no sense.

Patterson began testing the world outside his lab. Ocean water. Mountain snow. Everywhere he looked, lead levels were hundreds of times higher than natural background levels.

And then he understood.

Since the 1920s, oil companies had been adding a compound called tetraethyl lead to gasoline. It prevented engine knock and made cars run smoother. But every car on every road was functioning as a poison dispersal system, spraying microscopic lead particles into the air with every mile driven.

Lead is a neurotoxin. It damages developing brains. It lowers IQ. It causes behavioral problems, aggression, and cognitive impairment. And an entire generation of children was breathing it every single day.

Patterson had to make a choice.

He was a geochemist. His job was studying rocks and isotopes, not fighting corporations or advocating for public health. He had stable funding and a promising academic career. He could have simply published his Earth-age discovery and moved on to the next project.

But he couldn’t unsee what he’d found.

In the mid-1960s, he published papers warning that industrial lead contamination was poisoning the environment and harming human health.

The response was swift and brutal.

The lead industry was massive, wealthy, and had no intention of losing billions in revenue. Their chief scientific defender was Dr. Robert Kehoe, who had spent decades assuring the public that environmental lead was natural and harmless. Kehoe was polished, well-funded, and had the backing of powerful corporations.

When Patterson challenged this narrative, the industry attempted to buy his silence. Representatives visited him offering generous research grants and institutional support. All he had to do was redirect his focus elsewhere.

Patterson refused.

So they tried to destroy him professionally.

His funding from petroleum-connected sources was immediately cut. The industry pressured his university to dismiss him. They used their influence to block his papers from peer-reviewed journals. They publicly dismissed him as an overzealous geologist stepping outside his expertise.

For years, it worked. Patterson was marginalized, labeled an alarmist, and isolated from mainstream scientific discussions.

But Patterson had something the industry couldn’t counter: evidence from before the contamination began.

He realized he needed a time machine—a way to prove what Earth’s atmosphere was like before automobiles. So he traveled to one of the most remote places on the planet: Greenland.

In brutal, freezing conditions, Patterson and his team drilled deep into ancient glaciers, extracting long cylinders of ice. These ice cores were frozen time capsules. Snow that fell in 1700 was preserved deep in the ice. Snow from 1900 was higher up. Snow from the 1950s was near the surface.

Back in his clean lab, Patterson carefully melted layers of ice from different time periods and measured their lead content.

The results were devastating to the industry’s claims.

For thousands of years, atmospheric lead levels were essentially zero. Then, starting precisely in the 1920s—exactly when leaded gasoline was introduced—the levels shot upward like a rocket. The graph was unmistakable. The contamination wasn’t natural. It was recent, man-made, and accelerating.

Armed with this irrefutable proof, Patterson returned to the fight.

He testified before congressional committees, sitting across from industry lawyers who tried to confuse the science. He wasn’t comfortable with public speaking.

He was nervous, awkward, and preferred the quiet predictability of his laboratory. But he refused to back down.

He told legislators they were poisoning their own children. He showed them the ice core data. He made the invisible visible.

Slowly, reluctantly, the truth broke through.

Other scientists began supporting his findings. Public health advocates took notice. Parents started demanding action. The tide turned.

In the 1970s, the United States passed the Clean Air Act and began the slow process of removing lead from gasoline. It took years of regulatory battles, but eventually, unleaded gasoline became the standard.

The results were nothing short of miraculous.

Within years, blood lead levels in American children dropped by nearly 80%. An entire generation was saved from cognitive impairment, behavioral disorders, and reduced intelligence. Millions of lives were protected from lead-related health problems.

Clair Patterson had won.

Yet when he died in 1995, few outside the scientific community knew his name. He never received a Nobel Prize. He never became wealthy. He simply returned to his laboratory and continued studying the chemistry of the oceans and the history of the Earth.

Patterson’s story is a reminder of what integrity looks like when nobody’s watching.

It’s easy to do the right thing when the crowd is cheering. It’s infinitely harder when powerful interests are trying to ruin you, when your career is threatened, when taking the money would be so much easier.

He could have stayed silent. He could have enjoyed a comfortable, well-funded career studying rocks while children’s minds were damaged. He could have said, “Not my problem.”

But he looked at the data, looked at the world, and decided truth mattered more than comfort.

He gave us the age of the Earth—a number that changed our understanding of time itself.

And then he gave us a future—a world where children could grow up without poison in their lungs.

We often imagine heroes as soldiers, activists, or celebrities. But sometimes a hero is just a stubborn man in a white lab coat, scrubbing a floor over and over, refusing to accept a convenient lie.

He cleaned the room.

And then he cleaned the world.