You're looking at the first ever artificial heart. The machine looks more like a cooking station that would serve up some barbeque.

Instead, it was actually designed to temporarily stand in for a human heart. It pumps blood around the body until a patient's ticker got back on the job. Known as the Mayo-Gibbon heart lung machine, it was built in 1957. It is considered as forefather of modern heart bypass machines.

Today, it is housed at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, and just because we don't use it anymore, versions today are a whole lot smaller. After all, how do you fit something like that in your chest? [Smithsonian via New Scientist]