Electrocardiography 100 Years Ago

Abstract

IN 1987, we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of electrocardiography.1 It may be appropriate now to review the principal contributors to the early development of the field and the critical role of one piece of equipment, the string galvanometer. The recording from the body surface of electrical potentials generated by the heart was first described in 1887,1 but early electrocardiographic instruments, which were called "electrometers," were not practical. They were delicate and inconvenient, and they had inherent distortion.2 It was only after the introduction of the sensitive and more convenient string galvanometer that clinical electrocardiography was launched. The string galvanometer . . .