The field of prosthetics exists today because there have always been innovative people who believed it was possible to make functional replacement limbs. Not surprisingly, some of the earliest creators of prosthetic components were people with limb loss who designed, and sometimes built, their own devices, including pioneers like Samuel Decker, a Civil War veteran with bilateral upper-limb loss, and D. W. Dorrance, who invented the split hook terminal device in 1912 after losing his hand in a sawmill accident.