When Don Farnsworth was a kid in the 1960s, he and his brother liked to toss a football around the yard, kicking it as hard as they could to see if they could make it burst. Except it wasn't really a football. It was a prototype cardio-pulmonary resuscitator—a football-shaped device designed to help patients breathe—developed by their dad. That wasn't the only unusual plaything the boys borrowed from their dad; they also used to hook up the heart rate monitors he brought home from work to see how fast they could get their heart rates to rise.
Elliott C. Farnsworth, '48, MBA '51, a pioneer in the development of medical equipment and cardiac patient care, died January 24 in Alameda, Calif. He was 82.
Farnsworth had Stanford in his blood. His parents, Helen Cherington Farnsworth and Paul Randolph Farnsworth, both were Stanford professors. He married fellow Stanford graduate Jacqueline Binns Farnsworth, '50, MA '56, PhD '74, in Memorial Church in 1950, and the couple raised five children together.
Farnsworth co-founded a medical device company, Corbin-Farnsworth, in Palo Alto in 1960. And there, with partner Tom Corbin, Farnsworth developed the country's first defibrillators, pacemakers and heart monitors. These life-saving devices were mentioned in the January 28, 1966 issue of Life magazine as part of an article about the Max Cart, the earliest version of today's crash cart, loaded with everything necessary to restart and monitor a patient's heart. The Max Cart has been displayed at the Smithsonian Institute.
One of his father's fondest memories, recalls Don Farnsworth, involved the use of one of his heart monitors by President Dwight Eisenhower. "Dad found out that during one of President Eisenhower's hospitalizations, his heart was being monitored by one of Corbin-Farnsworth's old heart monitors. Dad immediately sent a new model to the hospital, but since the president couldn't receive gifts, Dad had to sell it to them."
After selling Corbin-Farnsworth to the pharmaceutical firm Smith, Klein & French (now part of GlaxoSmithKlein) in 1964, Farnsworth and his family moved to Chicago. There, Farnsworth created Abbott Medical Electronics Company for Abbott Laboratories. In 1986, Farnsworth returned to the Bay Area where he ran the family's miniatures wholesale business. He and Jacqueline were active members of several organizations, including the Home Club, the Penguins Dance Club and the Rossmore Cotillion.
In addition to his wife and son Don, Farnsworth is survived by son Scott and daughters Barbara and Wendy, five grandchildren, and his sister, Susan Caron. He was predeceased by his son Roger.
Julie Muller Mitchell, ’79, is a writer in San Francisco.
