Who received the first successful permanent artificial heart implant in 1982?

Barney Clark received the first successful permanent artificial heart implant in 1982.

On 2 December 1982, surgeons at the University of Utah Medical Center implanted the Jarvik-7 artificial heart into Clark, a dentist with severe heart failure. The device was designed by a team led by Robert Jarvik and powered by an external pneumatic system.

Clark lived for 112 days after the operation. He remained connected to a large compressor, and the experience demonstrated that a mechanical device could sustain a human life when a biological heart could no longer do so.

This was not the first artificial heart experiment of any kind. Earlier temporary devices and animal experiments had already occurred, and Paul Winchell patented an artificial-heart design decades earlier. Clark’s operation is remembered specifically because the artificial heart was implanted as a permanent replacement.