56 Facts About Forrest Mims

Forrest M Mims III is a magazine columnist and author.

Forrest Mims became a commissioned officer in the United States Air Force, served in Vietnam as an Air Force intelligence officer, and a Development Engineer at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory.

Forrest 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.

Forrest Mims served as Chairman of the Environmental Science Section of the Texas Academy of Science.

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

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

Forrest Mims was born in 1944 in Houston, Texas to Forrest M Mims, Jr.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forrest Mims had been interested in model rocketry since high school and brought a supply of rockets to Vietnam.

Forrest Mims used a nearby horse racing track as a launch site to test his rocket guidance systems.

Forrest Mims tested his infrared travel aid at the Saigon School for Blind Boys and Girls in Saigon and the story appeared in many US newspapers.

Colonel David R Jones of the Air Force Weapons Laboratory learned of Mims's experiments on a trip to Vietnam and arranged for Mims to be assigned to the Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Colonel Jones had to make special arrangements because Forrest Mims did not have the required engineering degree.

Forrest Mims arrived at the lab in March 1968, and worked on various laser projects.

Forrest Mims organized the Albuquerque Model Rocketry Club to interest students in model rocketry.

Flynn invited Forrest Mims to write an article about his "Transistorized Tracking Light for Night Launched Model Rockets" and it was published in the September 1969 issue of Model Rocketry.

Forrest Mims earned $93.50 for his first article as a professional writer and became a regular contributor to Model Rocketry.

The December 1969 issue of Model Rocketry carried a press release written by Forrest Mims announcing that Reliance Engineering had formed a subsidiary company, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems.

Forrest Mims asked the editors if they wanted a project story and they agreed.

Ed Roberts and Forrest Mims developed an LED communicator that would transmit voice on an infrared beam of light to a receiver hundreds of feet away.

Forrest Mims was out of the Air Force and wanted to pursue a career as a technology writer.

Roberts asked Forrest Mims to write the Altair 8800 user's manual in return for an assembled Altair, which Forrest Mims donated to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History together with many original MITS documents and his high school language translating analog computer, in 1987.

Forrest Mims wrote technical books on semiconductor lasers and light-emitting diodes.

Forrest Mims coauthored a book on electronic calculators with his friend, Ed Roberts in 1974.

Solomon gave them advice on selling project kits such as the "Opticom LED Communicator" but Forrest Mims was really interested in becoming a full-time writer.

Solomon explained the magazine publishing business and helped Forrest Mims get articles placed in Popular Electronics.

Forrest Mims wrote for other magazines; "Experiment With a $32 Solid State Laser" was featured on the June 1972, cover of Radio-Electronics.

In October 1975, Forrest Mims convinced Art Salsberg, Editor of Popular Electronics, to offer him a monthly column, the "Experimenter's Corner".

Forrest Mims later added two additional columns, "Project of the Month" and "Solid-State Developments".

Forrest Mims wrote for this magazine until it ceased publication in April 1985.

Meanwhile, Salsberg had started another hobbyist magazine, Modern Electronics; and Forrest Mims wrote a monthly column and was a contributing editor.

In 1972, Forrest Mims wrote two hobbyist project books for Radio Shack.

Forrest Mims titled the circuit "Sound Synthesizer" in 1982 then later called "Stepped-Tone Generator".

In May 1988, Forrest Mims wrote to Scientific American proposing that he take over "The Amateur Scientist" column, which needed a new editor.

The magazine flew Forrest Mims to New York to discuss details but the editor had second thoughts after he learned that Forrest Mims was a practicing Christian who rejected Darwinian evolution and abortion.

In 2006, Forrest Mims expressed concern with a March 3,2006 lecture by scientist Eric Pianka.

Pianka has stated that Forrest Mims took his statements out of context and that Pianka was explaining what would happen from biological principles alone if present human population trends continue, and that he was not in any way advocating genocide.

Forrest Mims continued his investigations into the dual use of LEDs while in college:.

In 1980, Forrest Mims demonstrated the dual use concept of LEDs by building a bi-directional LED voice-communication circuit that allowed two people to transmit speech optically through the air and through a 100-meter section of optical fiber.

For more than thirty years, Forrest Mims has made accurate and detailed atmospheric measurements.

The project began in May 1988, when Forrest Mims started experimenting with making UV-B measurements using homemade equipment.

In 1989, Forrest Mims designed and built the first Total Ozone Portable Spectrometer to monitor ozone, and instruments to measure haze and water vapor.

Forrest Mims' original LED sun photometer is in his left hand.

Forrest Mims first LED sun photometer is still in use.

Forrest Mims has compared his measurements against Dobson 76 and Brewers 009 and 119 at the Mauna Loa Observatory each year since 1992.

Forrest Mims' design is unique in that it employs an ordinary LED as a twilight detector and no external optics beyond the epoxy lens in which the LED chip is encapsulated.

Since 2013, Forrest Mims has used several LED twilight photometers to detect layers of smoke and dust in the troposphere and volcanic aerosols in the stratosphere.

Forrest Mims has participated in forming a science-focused team in his three children.

Forrest Mims had participated in setting up a stand on the ground for sampling the winds, but Sarah wanted to remove local-air-and-ground influences.