 In 1947, he performed the first successful defibrillation.He had been operating on a 14-year-old boy with a congenital disorder, but towards the end of the surgery as the boy's chest was being closed, the boy went into cardiac arrest.Beck reopened the chest and tried to massage the heart by hand for approximately 45 minutes, before proceeding to the use of defibrillator which had been designed by Beck and built by his friend James Rand (of the Rand Development Corp.).