What if scientists could build a brand-new heart out of plastic and metal — and put it inside a person?

The Day the First Artificial Heart Saved a Life!

When a plastic pump gave someone a second chance at life

Doctors put the first permanent artificial heart in a patient in 1982 — and it worked!

Imagine your heart is like a pump that never stops working — beating about 100,000 times every single day! But what happens when someone's heart gets too tired to keep pumping? On June 17, 1982, doctors in Salt Lake City, Utah, made medical history by implanting the very first permanent artificial heart into a real patient!

The patient was a retired dentist named Barney Clark, who was 61 years old. His own heart was failing, and he needed something incredible to survive. Dr. William DeVries and his team spent seven hours carefully placing a mechanical heart called the Jarvik-7 inside his chest.

The Jarvik-7 was about the size of a grapefruit and was made of plastic and metal. It was powered by a machine outside the body through tubes — kind of like plugging yourself into the wall! The device was named after Dr. Robert Jarvik, the brilliant inventor who designed it.

Did you know the artificial heart beat about 80 times per minute, just like a real heart? It had two pumps that worked together to push blood through the body. Barney Clark lived for 112 days with his new mechanical heart — proving that humans could survive with a machine doing the heart's job!

💡 The Jarvik-7 artificial heart had to be connected to a 400-pound machine that the patient had to wheel around everywhere — imagine bringing that to school!