Forrest Mims

Forrest M. Mims III is an American amateur scientist, magazine columnist, and author of Getting Started in Electronics and Engineer's Mini-Notebook series of instructional books that were originally sold in Radio Shack electronics stores and are still in print.

Forrest Mims was born in 1944 in Houston, Texas to Forrest M. Mims, Jr. (1923–1996) and Ollieve E. (Dunn) Mims (1924–1995).

He was the oldest of five children, two boys and three girls.

Mims' father was an Air Force pilot and the family lived on military bases from Alaska to Florida but their home state was Texas.

Mims was interested in science at an early age, and he built an analog computer as a high school science fair project in 1960.

While memorizing his Latin class vocabulary words, Mims conceived a computer that could translate twenty words from one language to another.

The input was six potentiometers (variable resistors) each having a dial with 26 letters.

Entering the first six letters of the word on the potentiometers set a total electrical resistance.

The memory of known words was a bank of 20 screwdriver-adjustable trimmer resistors.

(Mims later referred to this as "Screwdriver-Programmable Read Only Memory", SPROM.) The memory was searched by a motor driven switch that compared the resistance of the input word with each memory resistor.

When a match was found the motor would stop and one of 20 output lamps would be on.

This was not a practical language translator, but it was an impressive science fair project for the early 1960s.

Mims entered Texas A&M University in the fall of 1962 as a physics major.

The mathematics courses convinced him to major in liberal arts.

The infrared diodes had just been introduced by Texas Instruments in 1965, and sold for $365 each.

Mims visited Dr. Edwin Bonin of Texas Instruments and explained his project.

After reviewing the finished design, Dr. Bonin sent Mims three infrared-emitting diodes.

Mims graduated from Texas A&M University in 1966 with a major in government and minors in English and history.

He graduated in 1966, with a major in government with minors in English and history.

Mims pursued his electronics avocation while at A&M.

His great-grandfather was blind, and this led Mims to create a travel aid for the blind.

This device was similar to RADAR, except it used the newly developed infrared-emitting diode to send intense pulses of light that reflected from obstacles.

The returned light was converted to an audio tone that increased in amplitude as the distance to the obstacles was reduced.

Mims arranged to exhibit his prototype at the annual Texas Medical Association convention held in Austin in April 1966.

Wearing his Texas A&M Corps of Cadets uniform, Mims demonstrated his "electronic eyes" to the convention attendees.

Mims and his device were widely reported in Texas newspapers.

He became a commissioned officer in the United States Air Force, served in Vietnam as an Air Force intelligence officer (1967), and a Development Engineer at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory (1968–70).

Mims has no formal academic training in science, but still went on to have a successful career as a science author, researcher, lecturer and syndicated columnist.

His series of hand-lettered and illustrated electronics books sold over 7.5 million copies and he is widely regarded as one of the world's most prolific citizen scientists.

Mims does scientific studies in many fields using instruments he designs and makes and his scientific papers have been published in many peer-reviewed journals, often with professional scientists as co-authors.

Much of his research deals with ecology, atmospheric science and environmental science.

Mims wrote an article for the December 1987 issue of Modern Electronics describing his homebrew analog computer complete with schematics and photographs.

A simple instrument he developed to measure the ozone layer earned him a Rolex Award for Enterprise in 1993.

Mims edited The Citizen Scientist — the journal of the Society for Amateur Scientists — from 2003 to 2010.

He also served as Chairman of the Environmental Science Section of the Texas Academy of Science.

For 17 years he taught a short course on electronics and atmospheric science at the University of the Nations, an unaccredited Christian university in Hawaii.

He is a Life Senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Mims is a Fellow of the pseudoscientific organizations International Society for Complexity, Information and Design and Discovery Institute which propagate creationism.

He is also a global warming denier.

In December 2008, Discover named Mims one of the "50 Best Brains in Science."