In the summer of 1999, Bob and I talked about his experiences at AO, as he had been a close family friend, having joined the company shortly before the Flood of 1955. During that time, he stayed in our home and I recall Bob helping me play with my blocks. The engineer in him helped me make a "shoot-to shoot" as we called it - a tower that allowed marbles to shoot down the ramps he made.

In any case, during the early and mid-1960s, Bob was involved with the AO's cardiac instrument division, which I recall was in Bedford, MA. Bob talked about an article int the NE Journal of Medicine ~1963. He said that " Bill Burnhardt and Robert Innis worked on trans-illumination of the ventricular septum in open heart surgery. The significance of this work is that it was demonstrated in medicine that fiber optics had utility because the source of light could be made remote from the subject matter being illuminated.

The second article (Gambel and Innis) was of visualization of the inside of the heart thru a fiber optic cardioscope. The significance of this work was that this was the first time it was demonstrated that visualization of subject matter inside the body could be done.
 
 

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