On Halloween morning in 1957, the power went out across Minneapolis.

At the University of Minnesota, several young patients were recovering from open heart surgery. Their heartbeats were being kept steady by pacemakers that plugged into the wall.

Within about a month, a young engineer who fixed the hospital's equipment had built a pacemaker that ran on a battery. It fit in a box about the size of a small paperback book.

Most investors couldn't tell you that story. But plenty of income investors know the company he started. It has raised its dividend 49 years in a row. Through the inflation of the early 1980s... 2008... 2020... every year, a raise.

Today, we'll show you how a garage repair shop became a $36 billion a year medical technology company. We'll show you what a 49 year dividend record can tell you, and what it can't. And we'll tell you whether it made our list of 25 holdings this quarter.

Let's start at the beginning...

Earl Bakken had a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota. In 1949, he and his brother-in-law, Palmer Hermundslie, started a business in a garage in northeast Minneapolis.

They fixed electronic equipment for the university's hospitals.

In their first month, they took in $8, for repairing one centrifuge. To keep going, they repaired household radios and television sets on the side, and sold other companies' medical equipment.

The university's famed heart surgeon, Dr. C. Walton Lillehei, was operating on children with holes in their hearts. Some came out of surgery with a condition called heart block, and their hearts needed help to keep a steady beat.

The help came from a machine on a wheeled cart that drew its power from the hospital's wall outlets. To move a patient from the operating room to recovery, staff ran extension cords down the hallways.

Bakken kept that kind of equipment running.

Keep that cart and its wall plug in mind. We'll come back to it.

At about 9:00 a.m. on October 31, 1957, an explosion at a power plant south of Minneapolis knocked out electricity across the region.

The way the company has told it for decades, the blackout was the spark. The next day, Lillehei stopped Bakken in a hospital hallway and asked him for a pacemaker that ran on a battery.

Bakken remembered a circuit for a transistor metronome he had seen in Popular Electronics, a hobby magazine. He adapted it, and after about a month of tinkering in his garage, he handed Lillehei a pacemaker a patient could wear. By the spring of 1958, an improved model was on sale.

The university's own archive adds a twist. Six weeks before the blackout, Lillehei had written that his team was already working "at a feverish pace" on a battery pacemaker. It also found that the hospitals had backup power, and that newspapers reported no injuries. The blackout made the need plain, but the idea was already in the air.

That year, it won exclusive rights to make and sell an implantable pacemaker built by an engineer named Wilson Greatbatch and a surgeon, Dr. William Chardack.

Sales took off, from $180,000 in 1960 to about $500,000 in 1962.

The same year it won those rights, its board asked Bakken to write down what the company was for. He wrote that its purpose was to "alleviate pain, restore health, and extend life."

Even so, with sales growing fast, the company nearly went bankrupt in the early 1960s. A bank loan, new outside money and cost cuts pulled it through.

In January 2015, the company closed its purchase of Covidien, an Irish hospital supplier, for about $50 billion in cash and stock. The deal moved its legal home to Ireland. Its main operations stayed in the Minneapolis area.

In the fiscal year that ended in April 2026, revenue was $36.4 billion, up 8.4%, or 5.8% on the organic basis the company also reports, which leaves out currency moves and deals. The company called it its fastest growth in ten years.

The biggest piece is its heart business. Cardiovascular sales reached $14.0 billion, about 38% of the total, up 12%.

And remember that cart with its wall plug?

Today, the company sells a pacemaker about the size of a large vitamin. It is placed inside the heart itself, with no wires running to it. U.S. regulators approved it in 2016, and its sales grew in the mid teens in the company's latest fiscal fourth quarter.

The new fiscal year has started fast. Revenue rose 13.7% in the quarter that ended in July 2026, though an extra week in the quarter added about $570 million of that.

Here's what the last ten years looked like.

As of October 1, this stock yielded 3.3%.

Plenty of income investors would see a 49 year record and that yield and stop there. The table tells the rest.

The dividend grew from $1.52 a share in fiscal 2016 to $2.84 last year, about 6.5% a year. But the raises have shrunk. Each of the last four added a penny to the quarterly dividend.

The reason is how much of the cash the dividend already takes. Last year, dividends used about 67 cents of every dollar of free cash flow. The $2.84 a share came to about 76% of reported earnings per share, and about half of the adjusted earnings per share the company highlights.

The dividend is one part of it. The growth of the business behind the dividend is the rest.

And here, the business grew slowly. Over ten years, revenue rose about 26%, about 2.3% a year, and that includes selling off businesses with about $2.4 billion of yearly sales in 2017. Earnings per share rose about 50%.

The share price tells the same story. Ten years ago, the shares traded at about $86. On October 1, they closed at $86.44.

Start with growth. Before last year's 8.4%, reported revenue had grown less than 2% a year on average for nine years. The recent pickup is real, but part of the latest quarter came from an extra week.

The dividend also has less room to grow. With two thirds of free cash flow already going to dividends, raises have shrunk to a penny a quarter. A streak can continue with very small raises.

And there's debt. The company owed about $28 billion at the end of its last fiscal year, against about $9.2 billion of cash and investments.

Last, the market can see all of this. It has watched a decade of slow growth, and it can see the faster growth management now expects. Whether that pickup lasts is the open question.

Those risks sit next to a 77 year record. It began with $8 and a centrifuge. It helped turn a pacemaker into something a patient could wear, and then carry inside the body. It has raised its dividend 49 years in a row. And the heart business that began with a wall plug is now its largest.

Think you know? Hit reply and tell us your guess. We read every reply.

Subscribers to The Dividend Record Portfolio can see the answer right below. They'll also see whether it's one of our 25 holdings this quarter, and the numbers behind the story: where a decade of returns actually came from, how well the dividend is covered, what today's price assumes, and how the stock has held up when the market fell apart.