How General Motors Modeled the First Mechanical Heart After a Cadillac V-12

In the summer of 1952, 41-year-old Henry Opitek showed up at Harper University Hospital in Detroit complaining of shortness of breath. If ever there was a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty story, Opitek’s is it. Turned out, he had a major heart issue. At the same time, he was in luck. Doctors at Harper had a nifty device they wanted to try out. Opitek was about to become the first human being to be kept alive using a mechanical heart. The thing was larger than today’s microwave ovens, and—not at all coincidentally—it resembled a V-12 engine.

This story originally appeared in Volume 6 of Road & Track.

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Ask yourself: What is the first engine to appear on earth? What is the origin of all rhythm and the inspiration for all motors that have ever existed? That would be the human heart. Like any engine, this one has a tendency to blow a gasket now and then. So in the early Fifties, a Harper surgeon named Forest Dodrill met with Charles Wilson, president of General Motors, who was chairman of the Michigan Heart Association. Their goal: to develop the world’s first mechanical heart. They teamed up with a group of GM scientists headed by Edward Rippingille.

At a GM lab, Rippingille oversaw the design of the device that would ultimately become known as the Dodrill-GMR heart machine. He outlined the thinking in an internal GM publication in 1952: “We have pumped oil, gasoline, water, and other fluids one way or another in our business. It seems only logical we should try to pump blood.” The team tested 10 designs and settled on a machine with two banks of six pumps, sort of like a V-12. They tried it on dogs that were awaiting euthanasia. When they thought they had it all dialed in, they needed a human patient. Enter Henry Opitek.