Erlanger is a US physiologist who, in collaboration with Herbert Spencer Gasser, developed techniques for recording nerve impulses using a cathode ray oscilloscope in 1922 in St. Louis.
While working at Johns Hopkins University, he created a sphygmomanometer, and instrument for measuring blood pressure. It was the arrival if Gasser, one of his former students, that ignited his interest in the study of the conduction of nervous impulses.
They performed their research in a humidified frog nerve kept at a constant temperature. For this work and its continuation by Erlanger and Gasser separately in later years, they were in 1944 jointly awarded a Nobel Prize.
It can be regarded as the first major discovery in neurophysiology coming from the New World.
Further progress came with the introduction of intracellular in the middle decades of the 20th century by Gilbert Ling, Ralph Girard, Kenneth Cole, Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley.
Recording nerve impulses by Joseph Erlanger
