Willem Einthoven

Willem Einthoven was a Dutch medical doctor and physiologist, born in 1860 in Semarang on Java in the Dutch East Indies. After his father, a doctor, died, his mother brought the family back to the Netherlands in 1870 and settled in Utrecht, where Einthoven took his medical degree in 1885. He became a professor at the University of Leiden in 1886 and joined the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1902. From 1901 he built a series of string galvanometers, thin conducting filaments hung between strong electromagnets, which could record the electrical activity of the heart through the body. His invention of the first practical electrocardiograph in 1895 won him the 1924 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.