where Beck placed its two metal paddles on the boy's heart and delivered 1,500 volts of electricity. The boy lived. Beck had just performed the first successful defibrillation. And during the 1950s, ...

An emergency-room doctor attaches paddles to a patient's chest and delivers an electric jolt to the heart. That's a defibrillator in action, a desperate attempt to jump-start a heart whose rhythms ...