Otis Boykin

Otis Frank Boykin was born on the twenty-ninth of August 1920 at Dallas, Texas, the son of Walter Benjamin Boykin — a carpenter and lay Baptist preacher — and Sarah Boykin, a domestic worker who died of heart failure when he was one. He attended the segregated Booker T. Washington Senior High School at Dallas, where he was valedictorian of the class of 1937, and took the bachelor's at Fisk University in Nashville in 1941. He moved north the same year to work as a laboratory assistant for the Majestic Radio and Television Corporation in Chicago and undertook graduate studies in physics at the Illinois Institute of Technology between 1946 and 1947. Financial constraint prevented him from completing the doctorate; he established instead at Chicago his own engineering consultancy, Boykin-Fruth, in 1947.

He filed his first patent in 1959 — Patent 2,891,227 for a wire-precision resistor of substantially improved temperature stability. The device, which permitted electronic measurement of voltage and resistance accurate to within one part in five thousand across a range of working temperatures previously attainable only in laboratory conditions, became the foundational component of all high-accuracy electronic instrumentation manufactured in the United States from the early 1960s. He filed twenty-six further patents across the following twenty years, principally refinements of the resistor and ancillary control devices.

The 1959 wire-precision resistor was incorporated into the early implantable cardiac pacemakers manufactured by the Greatbatch Corporation from 1960 — the application that has saved an estimated three million lives by the present — and into the guidance computers of the Apollo Saturn V rocket and of the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile system. The resistor and its later refinements were licensed to IBM, to General Electric and to the Department of Defense across the 1960s; the royalties supported him through the remainder of his life.

He died at Chicago on the thirteenth of March 1982 — by the historical irony of his career — of complications of congestive heart failure of the kind his pacemaker patents had been instrumental in treating. He was sixty-one.

He is honored here as the inventor of the wire-precision resistor.