On this date in 1936 American aviator Charles A. Lindbergh and Alexis Carrel, M.D., presented an artificial heart pump they developed to the International Scientific Congress in Copenhagen, Denmark. It was a sterile glass chamber through which fluid containing food and oxygen was pumped. A number of tissues and organs were kept alive by the pump, including tissue from a chicken's heart, which survived for 32 years. Carrel, a surgeon and experimental biologist, won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1912 for his work in suturing blood vessels, organ transplants, and transfusions.

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