An old idea with slow progress
The heart is a pump, and people have long suspected that a pump could be built to replace it. For most of history that was only a thought. A device that moves blood must be strong, gentle on blood cells, free of clotting and powered for years without a break. Each of those requirements took decades to address, and the history of the prosthetic heart is mostly the story of learning what was needed rather than of a single machine appearing.
Perfusion and the heart-lung machine
One early step came in the 1930s, when the surgeon Alexis Carrel and the aviator Charles Lindbergh built a glass perfusion pump to keep organs alive outside the body. It was not a heart replacement, but it showed that blood and tissue could be sustained mechanically for a time.
The more direct ancestor of the artificial heart was the heart-lung machine. John Gibbon in the United States worked on the idea for years and is credited with the first successful open-heart operation using a machine that took over both heart and lung work, in 1953. Others, including C. Walton Lillehei with cross-circulation techniques and later groups with simpler oxygenators, developed practical methods in the 1950s. These machines were meant to support the patient for hours during surgery, not for weeks, but they proved that circulation could be handled outside the body.
Experiments in animals
The first serious attempts to put a mechanical pump in the chest came in the 1950s. Willem Kolff, who had earlier built an artificial kidney, led research on artificial organs, and in 1957 Tetsuzo Akutsu and Kolff at the Cleveland Clinic placed an air-driven artificial heart in a dog, which survived only briefly. That was enough to show that the concept could work in principle and to attract more researchers. Interest increased during the 1960s, particularly in the United States, where government funding for artificial heart research expanded.
Animal work also taught researchers how hard the problem was. Blood tends to clot on foreign surfaces and can be damaged by pumps, which causes strokes and organ problems. Many experimental animals died from clots, bleeding or infection around the tubes that carried power from outside.
Assist devices and the first human cases
Because replacing the whole heart was so hard, doctors also asked whether a machine could simply help a failing heart. The result was the ventricular assist device. In 1966, a team led by Michael DeBakey reported a successful short-term use of a left ventricular assist device in a patient after heart surgery, and the device was later removed after the patient’s own heart recovered. This is often cited as an early example of mechanical support working as a bridge to recovery.
In 1969, Denton Cooley in Houston implanted an artificial heart designed by Domingo Liotta into a patient, Haskell Karp, who then waited for a donor heart. The device supported him for about three days before a transplant was done, but he died soon afterward. It was the first time a total artificial heart had been used in a human, and in the way of many firsts, it was also controversial: there were disputes about the origin of the device and the approvals involved. The idea of a bridge to transplant, keeping a patient alive until a donor organ is available, nonetheless became one of the central uses of heart support.
The shift to bridges
Heart transplantation, first performed in 1967 by Christiaan Barnard in South Africa, increased the demand for temporary mechanical support because donor hearts are always scarce. In the 1970s and 1980s, researchers developed pulsatile left ventricular assist devices that sat in the chest or abdomen and were powered through a line leaving the body. By the end of the 1980s, several of these devices had been used as bridges to transplant, and in later decades continuous-flow pumps became smaller and more durable. Some are now implanted not only for a short wait but for years of support.
This progression shows a pattern. Partial support came first because it asked for less: a pump that needs to help one ventricle can be simpler than one that must replace both. The total artificial heart arrived in clinics in the early 1980s and is covered in its own article. What this article adds is the groundwork: perfusion, the heart-lung machine, animal trials and the early assist devices.
Why the prosthetic heart stayed hard
Even today a mechanical heart is not a normal replacement. It requires a power source, usually with a part that sits outside the body, and patients typically need medication to reduce clotting. Early pumps ran on compressed air, while later ones used electric motors, and modern portable systems often rely on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. The wider history of energy storage helps explain why a compact, long-lasting supply arrived so slowly, and why controllers built around silicon chips mattered too. Infection around the exit site for the power line is a recurring problem, a reminder of how much the field still depends on the habits of antiseptic surgery. The device must adjust to exercise and rest, which a natural heart does automatically. Because of these issues, the history of the prosthetic heart has moved forward in careful steps, often with years of follow-up before the next stage.
Reading the history responsibly
Many sources describe “the first artificial heart” and name one surgeon or inventor. In reality, the field was built by many groups working in parallel on pumps, materials, power and surgery. This article is history, not medical advice, and outcomes for individual patients vary greatly. For present-day options, a cardiologist is the right source.