Professor Frank Pantridge of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast produced the first portable defibrillator in 1965. It operated from car batteries and weighed 70 Kilograms (~154 pounds). Its descendants are now used countless times daily across the world to save many lives. Pantridge went on to install the portable defibrillator in an ambulance, thus creating the pre-hospital coronary care unit known as the Pantridge Plan. However it was not until 1990, almost 25 years after he installed the first defibrillator in a Belfast ambulance, that Secretary of State for Health Kenneth Clarke announced £38 million was to be made available to equip all frontline ambulances in England with the equipment.

The IPCO/Pantridge defibrillator below was imported and available for sale in the United States during the late 1970s. The defibrillator was unique in its time for its size and weight, but required a separate monitor.

Submitted to NEMSM August 2011 by Mark Peck EMT-P