I started serious experiments at age two (1942), first in fluid dynamics, by falling through winter-ice in Ohio and drowning myself. After that I experimented with solid mechanics and dynamics by springing out of my crib and breaking a collarbone. Then I played with optics, repeatedly breaking glass windows using my wooden hammer and sometimes a bow and arrow (with the suction-cups removed). Even before I was six, I experimented with electronics by using a screwdriver and sometimes just my fingers to short electrical outlets about our home. After all that excitement, at age 7 while a cub scout enthusiastically earning all the awards offered, I built my first crystal radio receiver using a Quaker Oats cereal tube to support a tunable air-core coil, a safety pin as a cats-wisker-contact to a galena crystal as the diode, and a stack of scissored cellophane and tin foil squares as a capacitor (see for example: http://home.houston.rr.com/molerat/crystal.htm ).

Later, as a 14-year-old, I ended up undergoing emergency surgery after changing my research field from electronics to explosives. I caused a foot-deep hole in the parched-dry ground of our backyard in Pennsylvania and was thrown many feet into the air with broken and shattered bones from which to this day I still bear scars. Only after shooting myself in the foot with a high-powered rifle bullet, and later after lobbing rocks onto blasting caps really really scared me (I could tell because of the way my knees were shaking), did I think more seriously about where my activities were taking me. It was then at eighteen that I consciously and explicitly decided to narrow my experiments to things using more mathematics.

This started my growing up. I learned a lot about electronic devices and circuits getting my BS degree in physics from Principia College in Illinois, and a lot more getting my M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Aeronautical and Astronautical Science and Engineering from Stanford University in California.

In my professional life I was a researcher and inventor for the Air Force (experiments with solid propellant rockets), NASA (wind-tunnel experiments for super-sonic transport design), Optics Technology Inc. (electro-optical instruments), FMC (micro-computer controls for construction, industrial, and agricultural machinery), and Hewlett-Packard Co. (semiconductor manufacturing and document scanners and printers).

Today I continue my inventing, but as an independent inventor. One of my past inventions was “mini-environments” used today to enhance (and even replace) clean-rooms used in the manufacture of semiconductors. Another was simulation modeling techniques that have drastically reduced cycle-times in semiconductor manufacturing fabs. Others include optical navigation (first invented for a portable hand-held document-scanner and since used in all optical computer-mice), numerous electronic and optical sensors found in laser-jet and ink-jet printers, and structural devices and methods that integrate fiber-optics with semiconductors.

Since retiring from the corporate way-of-life, I get to do family things with my wife and grown kids, to visit with friends and relatives, to make new friends in far-away-places, to practice rope-climbing techniques while climbing tall trees to install and maintain antennae, to design and build circuits, to write software and micro-code, to improve my Morse code speed, to build and fly radio-control model planes, to work with friends in inventing new things (see http://www.novelthink.com ), to be outdoors, and good stuff like that.

Barclay J. Tullis, W6WT