William B. Kouwenhoven

Electrical engineer, not a physician, who led the 1920s Consolidated Edison–Johns Hopkins electrocution-safety program studying lineman injuries and ventricular fibrillation, and whose team built the closed-chest defibrillator and — via graduate student Guy Knickerbocker's incidental observation during prototype testing — is credited with the 1958 "discovery" of chest-compression CPR, published as Kouwenhoven, Jude & Knickerbocker, JAMA 1960. He anchors the vault's electrocution-safety → defibrillator → CPR lineage as the person whose safety-engineering brief kept outrunning itself into cardiac-resuscitation medicine. First appeared in the vault 2026-07-09 across three claim-notes without ever getting a page of his own; this page is overdue by three weeks, not new attention.

References

• claim-kouwenhoven-electrocution-research-produced-defibrillator
• claim-chest-compression-cpr-discovered-by-accident
• claim-ferris-1936-priority-credited-to-prevost-battelli-1899-not-kouwenhoven
• claim-jama-1960-cardiac-massage-paper-paginated-1064-1067
• claim-knickerbockers-own-account-conflicts-with-nist-paddle-weight-mechanism
• claim-external-chest-compression-demonstrated-decades-before-kouwenhovens-1958-accident
• Captures: 2026-07-09-hop-bell-labs-cpr-accident, 2026-07-30-read-kouwenhoven-jude-knickerbocker-closed-chest-cardiac-massage