Made by Hand (25 page)

Mims designed his first rocket guidance system while sitting in a seventh-grade English class at Hamilton Jr. High School in Houston. “I was looking at the fan on the wall and could see this idea for a new way of controlling a rocket in flight without using fins. That became a peer-review paper when I was an adult. I wasn’t learning English—I didn’t really care. All I cared about was inventing.”

The year 1958 marked a turning point in Mims’s life. He was at an amateur-rocketry meeting and saw a man using a small radio transmitter to remotely launch a rocket. He was stunned to learn that the man had made the radio controller at home. “The influence of a young person seeing what somebody else can do is incredibly important,” Mims told me. “Seeing that little transmitter in that rocket—that’s what really motivated me. I thought, ‘If that guy can do it, I can do it!’ ”

In addition to rockets and radio-controlled launch systems, Mims started making simple analog computers that could multiply two numbers. By the time he was a senior in high school in 1962, he had designed and built a Russian-to-English translator out of a homebuilt analog computer and some primitive digital circuitry.

Mims went to college, but after struggling with his first-year course in algebra, he realized that a traditional science education wasn’t going to work out. He switched majors to government, graduating in 1966 from Texas A&M University. While in school he continued to experiment with electronics, developing a device to help blind people sense obstacles in their path and beep if they were in danger of walking into them.

Even though he didn’t have a degree in science, Mims never stopped tinkering. In 1969, while serving in the air force, he cofounded Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. MITS built model-rocket telemetry devices, such as light flashers and radio transmitters, but the small company started branching out into selling electronics kits through ads in
Popular Electronics
. One of their kits was the Opticom, a voice transmitter that used light beams instead of radio waves as a signal.

When the kit sales proved disappointing, Mims sold back his share of equity to the other partners and began writing for electronics-hobbyist and model-rocketry magazines. MITS would later go on to make and sell the Altair 8800 in 1975. Mims wasn’t at MITS during this time, but he was hired to write the operating manual. (Fun fact: Bill Gates and Paul Allen moved to Albuquerque so they could write software for the Altair 8800, eventually founding Microsoft.)

Mims became a well-known writer in the hobbyist book and magazine trade. One day RadioShack editor Dave Gunzel got a look at one of Mims’s hand-drawn laboratory notebooks and fell in love with the neat lettering and charming anthropomorphic drawings of electronic components. He asked Mims to write a series of how-to books in the same style. “He even suggested using a crayon,” Mims said. “I said, ‘You can’t do a book with a crayon. It has to be a pen or a pencil.’ ” Gunzel conceded the point, and Mims went to work, drawing and lettering two pages a day and suffering terribly from writer’s cramp.

The suffering paid off. The first printing of a hundred thousand copies of
Getting Started in Electronics
sold out immediately. (The book is still in print by a different publisher and has sold in the neighborhood of 1.3 million copies. All together, Mims’s thirty RadioShack titles have sold more than 7 million copies.)

RadioShack’s books might have met with great success, but that didn’t stop the company from going the way of
Popular Science
and
Scientific American
. Founded in Boston in 1921 by Theodore and Milton Deutschmann, two brothers who wanted to cash in on the amateur-radio boom, RadioShack served the electronics-hobbyist market until the 2000s, when it shifted over to hawking cell-phone plans and other consumer electronics products. “RadioShack dropped all their books about five years ago,” Mims said, “which is one of the biggest mistakes they ever made, because the hobby parts were already going down, and then sales of electronic parts really dropped after that because there were no books to support the parts.”

Undaunted, Mims continued to conduct his own experiments and to explore new branches of science to feed his insatiable curiosity. He said he takes a hands-off approach to his three children’s education but has two rules: “If you’re gonna be in my family, you go to church on Sunday and you do a science fair project every year. Those are the two requirements of being in my family.” His children followed the rules, but he admits the teenage years were a little tougher to deal with. After son Eric (who had built a seismometer that picked up vibrations from two underground nuclear tests in Nevada) and eldest daughter Vicki (who calculated the sun’s rotation by tracking the movement of sunspots) had moved out, Mims called to ask them if he had been too strict about his science-project rule. He was wondering whether to stay the course with his youngest daughter, Sarah.

“Those children told me—this was the first time they opened up to me—‘We learned more from doing the science projects you made us do than from anything we learned in high school,’ ” Mims said. “And Sarah
wanted
to do it. She gave up being a cheerleader, and she’s very good-looking.”

Like her father, Sarah is something of a celebrity in amateur-science circles—“She’s the most famous [of my children], just put her name into Google,” Mims advised me. Sarah won first place at the science fair two years in a row at the Texas Junior Academy of Science. And while still a teenager, she was the lead author of a NASA paper about detecting smoke and dust that had traveled through air currents from thousands of miles away to her home in Seguin, Texas. As an eleventh-grader in 2002, Sarah designed and built an air sampler, sent it aloft in a kite, and examined the samples it collected. She found smoke particles from fires started by farmers in South America burning mold-infected crops in a backfiring attempt to sterilize the land before replanting it. Sarah also found living mold spores from the fires. An article published by NASA stated that “this surprising discovery from a young, amateur scientist has the potential to change the prevailing wisdom on the benefits of burning diseased crops or timber.”

“The agricultural people haven’t yet seen the implications of it,” Mims said. “But they will. Because the inertia is so great, they don’t always realize the significance of a major new discovery. Her discovery explained transport of disease organisms from plants across the ocean.”

Talking to Mims about his children’s education (and self-education) made me think about the way my own children were learning. When Sarina, now a seventh-grader, was in second grade, she told Carla and me that math was “like a rainbow.” I wasn’t sure what she meant, but I figured it was good for her to associate math with something so pleasant. Her teacher told us she was one of her best students when it came to math.

For the next couple of years, Sarina continued to excel, but by the time she finished fifth grade, her standardized-test math score had dropped from the ninetieth percentile to the thirty-fifth. She was now telling us that she disliked math. We were concerned, not only because she had previously enjoyed the subject but because she would soon be attending middle school and we wanted to make sure she would be able to attend a good one. The standardized test she would take in the sixth grade, the ISEE, would be sent to all of the middle schools she’d be applying to.

Carla and I asked the parents of Sarina’s classmates what they were planning to do about preparing their kids for the ISEE. Most said that they were signing their kids up for private tutoring sessions from an agency that specializes in the exam.

I didn’t want Sarina to get tutoring for the test for three reasons. First, it cost $1,700 for ten lessons. Second, we would have to disclose the fact that she’d been tutored for the ISEE on her middle school applications. Third, and most important, I wanted to find out
why
Sarina was having difficulty with math, and I figured that the only way I could get to the bottom of it was by tutoring her myself.

When I told Carla that I wanted to teach Sarina math, she liked the idea. I was surprised, because Carla usually favors HAP (hire a pro) over DIY. I can’t really blame her, not with my track record of starting ambitious projects and not finishing them, or else doing them badly and not going back to fix them. I insisted on installing tiles on the kitchen floor of our first house in Boulder, Colorado, shortly after we’d gotten married in 1988. I must have done something wrong with the grout, because many of the tiles cracked in the first few days. Every time we walked into the kitchen, the broken tiles served as a reminder of my incompetence and slothfulness. They were still cracked when we moved three years later. (I wonder if the current owners fixed them or not. I doubt it, because the last time I drove by the house, in 2005, the mailbox that had fallen off its mount when we lived there was still sitting on the porch steps where I’d set it down almost twenty years earlier.)

Another time, in 2003, Carla wanted to change the color of some doors in our house in Los Angeles from white to red. She wanted to call a painter, but I told her that I’d be able to handle a small job like that myself. I’d remembered seeing some red paint in our garage, left there by the people who had lived in the house before us. She agreed to let me do it, but not without reservation.

“Don’t make it look bad,” she warned.

“Of course I won’t,” I said, hurt at the insinuation that I could screw up such a simple task. I spread newspapers on the floor, found a brush, and began painting. It didn’t take long to realize that something wasn’t quite right with the paint. It was going on in streaks, thin and shiny. I had been hoping for more of a flat, even look. After I gave both doors a coat, the can was just about empty. I planned to buy more in the next day or two so I could apply another coat—and hopefully get rid of the streaky look—but I never made it to the paint store. Fortunately, guests assumed the streaky paint job was an intentional bit of flair and complimented us on the artistic touch, so Carla wasn’t too upset. Even so, the lucky result did nothing to boost my reputation as a competent handyman.

With so many failed projects behind me, why did Carla so readily agree to let me tutor Sarina in math? After all, if I screwed up this project, the consequences might be far worse than cracked tiles. Our daughter’s future was at stake. I couldn’t risk letting that happen. And that’s precisely why Carla let me do it. She knew that my sense of parental responsibility was too strong to let me slack off.

Deep down, I also hoped that my recent more-or-less successful DIY efforts had shown her that I was on my way to becoming a handyman of my word.

I ordered a copy of the ISEE preparation handbook, which contained sample tests, resolving that Sarina and I would work for one hour each week, on Sunday morning, for the twelve weeks until it was time for her to take the test. Sarina didn’t complain about our plan—she wanted to get into a good school.

On the first Sunday, she and I went into the guesthouse and sat at my desk. I opened the book to the Quantitative Reasoning practice test, which had twelve questions. I told her I wanted her to take the practice test so we could find out which areas of math she needed to work on: algebra, fractions, decimals, percentages, or geometry.

“I’ll just sit in this chair over here while you work,” I said. “When you’re done, we’ll go over the answers together.” I gave her several sharpened number-two pencils and a photocopy of the sheet used to mark her answers. I picked up a magazine and started reading.

After a couple of minutes of silence, Sarina sobbed, “I can’t
do
this!” and threw her pencil on the desk. I jumped out of my chair and sat down next to her. She was stuck on the very first problem: