The simplest ideas can be the ones that change the world. For Otis Boykin, it was a new way to make wirewound precision resistors. Just like that, he altered the course of electronics with his ideas about what a resistor could be. Now his inventions are in everything from household appliances and electronics to missile guidance computers.
While we like to geek out about developments in resistor tech, Otis’ most widely notable contribution to electronics is the control unit he designed for pacemakers, which regulate a person’s heartbeat. Pacemakers are a real-time clock for humans, and he made them more precise than ever.
Street Smarts and Book Smarts
Otis Frank Boykin was born August 29th, 1920 in Dallas, Texas to Sarah and Walter Boykin. Otis’ father was a carpenter who later became a preacher. His mother Sarah was a maid, and she died of heart failure when Otis was only a year old.
Otis in an undated photograph. Image via Philadelphia Tribune
Not much is known about Otis’ childhood, but he must have had some foundational interest in electronics and the drive to go after a career in the field. We do know that Otis graduated as the valedictorian of Booker T. Washington high school in 1938. Then he moved to Nashville, Tennessee to attend Fisk University on a scholarship. As part of the deal, he worked as an assistant in the university’s aerospace lab, testing automatic controls for various aircraft.
Otis graduated from Fisk in 1941 and moved to Chicago to work as a lab a ..
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