After 17 years doing sales and marketing for IBM, Simpson was recruited by a struggling medical equipment company in Redmond, Wash., in 1966. It was called Physio-Control, and it had made a dramatic advance in the defibrillator, which uses an electric shock to restart a heart after a heart attack. Company founder Dr. Karl William Edmark wanted Simpson to be their President to help market their big breakthrough: using DC, or direct current electricity, rather than AC, or alternating current, for defibrillation. It worked better, and made the machines smaller.
Simpson quickly turned the 5-person company around, getting the improved machine not only into hospital emergency rooms, but later portable units could be used in the field, becoming available just as a new profession was ramping up: paramedic. The “Lifepak” series of heart monitor/defibrillators made by Physio-Control became the gold standard for the field medic.
In 1985, the company produced the first AED: the automatic external defibrillator, which was so easy to use that today, even untrained non-medical people can shock a heart back into rhythm. That was good enough for Simpson: he had turned the company into the largest manufacturer of cardiac monitor/defibrillators in the world, and he retired at the end of that year.
If it’s not enough to be responsible for helping save countless lives, Simpson also wanted to make his employees’ lives better: he championed the four-day work week, allowing his “team members” (as he called them) to work four 10-hour shifts and have a three-day weekend every week. After he retired, Simpson spent his time working for non-profits, raising money for various causes, especially the University of Washington, where he served as Regent; he also served on 30 Boards of Directors. He died January 20 at 79, from congestive heart failure.
Author’s Note: CHF is not something that can be corrected by a defibrillator, so there’s no “irony” involved in his death.