A closer look
The man who revolutionized the pacemaker and countless guided missiles did it by obsessively perfecting the most boring component in electronics. Otis Boykin was an absolute master of the electrical resistor. Before him, precision resistors were incredibly fragile and expensive to produce. Boykin invented a wire-wound precision resistor that was dirt cheap, highly reliable, and resistant to extreme temperature shifts. His unsexy little components made the guided missile program viable and allowed the pacemaker to become small and affordable. In a cruel twist of irony, the man who enabled the modern pacemaker died of heart failure.
