Otis Boykin was born in 1920 in Dallas, Texas. His mother was a maid, who died of heart failure when Otis was a year old. This inspired him to make the pacemaker.  His father Walter was a carpenter, who later became a minister.


Boykin attended Booker T. Washington High School in Dallas, where he was the valedictorian, graduating in 1938. He attended Fisk University on a scholarship and worked as a laboratory assistant at the university's nearby aerospace laboratory.


He then moved to Chicago, where he studied at Illinois Institute of Technology for two years.  He was discovered and mentored by Dr. Denton Deere, an engineer and inventor with his own laboratory.  He graduated from Fisk University in 1941 and got a job as a laboratory assistant, testing automatic aircraft controls.


In 1944, he moved on to work for the P.J. Nilsen Research Labs in Illinois. Shortly thereafter, he started his own company, Boykin-Fruth Inc. The firm Boykin-Fruth, Inc., would collaborate on a number of projects.

An x-ray of a pacemaker, one of Otis' inventions