Abstract
Willem Einthoven was born on May 21, 1860 in Samarang, Java. He completed his medical studies in 1885 at the age of twenty-five at the University of Utrecht.
He gradually improved the technique of scanning electrical potentials, until he worked his way up to a special string galvanometer, which makes it possible to register these potentials in a photographic way. To describe the electrocardiographic curve, he used the letters P, Q, R, S, and T for the first time and introduced electrode fixation as is used today for standard limb leads ("Einthoven's Triangle").
He was also the first to use the term "electrocardiogram" to record cardiac potentials. In 1924 he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.
He died on September 29, 1929 in Leiden. The discovery of the electrocardiogram is one of the ten greatest discoveries in cardiology in the 20th century.