---
title: "William B. Kouwenhoven"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "William B. Kouwenhoven"
aliases: ["William Kouwenhoven","W. B. Kouwenhoven"]
first_seen: "2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Johns Hopkins electrocution-safety program","closed-chest defibrillator","chest-compression CPR","Guy Knickerbocker","electrical engineering into medicine"]
---


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