Tinkerer uses electric motor to keep his heart healthy

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Thinking back, Carl Hicks wonders if he planned "to do myself in" the day he defied doctors' orders and pulled the old lawn mower out of his backyard shed.

He hadn't mowed 50 feet when it happened. His knees went out. His body fell limp. Everything he saw "was like looking through frosted glass."

A history of mounting heart problems had come to this.

Maybe he figured this ending was better than being stuck in his house, told not to lift anything heavier than his shoes, "feeling myself getting big and fat," while his wife mowed the front yard on a hot summer day.

Hicks reached over to turn off the mower. He grabbed the spark plug by mistake.

Zap!

Telling the story, Hicks raises his eyes and cracks a perplexed smile, same as he did that day when he sat in the unmowed grass. "Everything cleared up bright like it is now."

Twenty years later, at 91, Hicks points to that moment as the inspiration for the invention he believes has kept his heart beating longer than anyone thought possible.

Behold his box.

Potent spark plug

It sits there on his coffee table in Liberty, the size of a small microwave oven, held together with duct tape. Electrical cords snake from its hard canvas sides. A metal crank protrudes from the top. Across the top, handwritten letters in black marker say, "Heart Shocker."

Doctors warn that homemade heart shockers are unreliable, probably ineffective and potentially dangerous. But that hasn't stopped Hicks from believing in the stuff in his box: modified portions of that old Western Auto lawn mower and its potent spark plug.

The crank attaches to the mower's starter. It spins the magneto that creates the charge that ignites the spark plug. An electric cord from a household iron attaches to the spark plug wire. Another connects to a bolt on the side of the motor for grounding.

Whenever he feels those ominous palpitations -- or sometimes just for good measure -- he grabs the hot line with his left hand and spins the crank with his right, giving himself a good pop.

Sometimes five or 10 in a row.

Richard Bowles, Hicks' physician for some 30 years, can't explain it. The retired doctor wouldn't actually recommend the box to anyone -- medical devices should be tested and calibrated, after all -- but he believes it has done wonders for Hicks and his irregularly beating heart.

"He had a heart condition that I thought would not bring him a long life," Bowles said. "I almost thought it was a witchcraft thing. I was torn between disbelief and acceptance."

Doctor loves the idea

More than 15 years have passed since David Steinhaus heard Hicks' tale, but the cardiologist hasn't forgotten it.

Steinhaus, executive medical director of the Mid America Heart Institute at St. Luke's Hospital, already had a deep interest in the sometimes bizarre history of electrical stimulation when Hicks gave him a box of his own.

"I used it as a doorstop," Steinhaus said.

But he loves the box, he said, or at least the idea of the box.

Technological advances in medicine such as automatic defibrillators and pacemakers are products of Hicks' kind of ingenuity, said Steinhaus, who gives presentations on the history of the technology.

When Charles Kite built an electrostatic generator and claimed to have revived a child in 18th-century London, he had a good notion about the medical possibilities of electricity.

Hicks, who retired from the Armco steel factory in 1972, always enjoyed tinkering in his workshop.

But the heart shocker might be his best work of all, his daughter said.

"We're all in awe that he'd come up with it," Elaine Lonborg said. "It took us a while to accept that it was what was helping him, but we feel like it saved his life."