Willem Einthoven

Origins and early life

Willem Einthoven was born at Semarang in the Dutch East Indies on 21 May 1860, and his official Nobel biography states that his father Jacob Einthoven was of Jewish and Dutch descent, and that his Jewish ancestors had emigrated from Spain to the Netherlands at the time of the Spanish Inquisition.

Work and career

The site records him through that named father, and this fiche states the limit of the evidence plainly: the sources establish the father's Jewish descent but go no further up the line, and they speak of ancestry rather than of a Jewish upbringing; no personal conversion is documented. His father, a military doctor, died when the boy was six, and the family returned to Utrecht, where he studied medicine. Appointed professor of physiology at Leiden at twenty-five, he set out to record the electrical activity of the heart, which existing instruments were too crude to capture.

He built the string galvanometer, in which a fine quartz thread coated with silver moves in a magnetic field, and by 1903 he had an instrument that traced the heartbeat with real precision. He named the deflections P, Q, R, S and T, the letters still used today, defined the three standard limb leads that still bear his name as Einthoven's triangle, and correlated the tracings with specific heart diseases, creating clinical electrocardiography.

He even transmitted signals by telephone line from a hospital more than a kilometre away. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1924 and died at Leiden on 29 September 1927.