Forrest Bird, The Birdman of Idaho

This story was first published on Oct. 7, 2007. It was updated on Aug. 27, 2009.

A viewer wrote 60 Minutes a while back and said we really should take a look at the life and times of a man, an inventor named Forrest Bird. Correspondent Morley Safer did and found, in the panhandle of Idaho, a remarkable American original.

Over the last eight decades, Bird has seen enough history and rubbed elbows with enough legends to rival that other Forrest, Forrest Gump.

As we reported two years ago, chances are Bird's invention has saved the life of someone you know, maybe even your own. And though he may not be a household name, when inventors get together Bird stands literally head and shoulders above the rest.

There's Patsy Sherman, who invented Scotchgard to protect the rug and the furniture, Dr. Harry Coover, who invented Super Glue to hold your stuff together, and Dr. Klaus Schmeigel, who invented Prozac to hold your head together.

And standing tall among them, all 6'4" of him, is Forrest Bird. His brainchild, the modern medical respirator, has given the breath of life to countless people around the world. It all began with a gizmo he cobbled together long ago to help a friend with emphysema breathe.

"I went to the hardware store and got a doorknob. You can see this doorknob right here at the top," Bird explains. "So the patient would push down like this on the doorknob and blow their lungs up. He did remarkably well with it."

The year was 1947 and Bird says he didn't have the "foggiest" idea that he was on the trail of inventing a device that would become one of the most routine parts of emergency medicine. "I mean, this was seeing a problem and coming up with a rudimentary answer, that was all," he says.

And that answer came from one of this tinkerer's many passions: aviation. Bird is an old flyboy who still takes to the skies in a souped-up 1938 Piper Cub that belonged to his father.

"My daddy was a World War I pilot, and I just wanted to be able to fly like he did," Bird says.

Bird spent World War II delivering aircraft from the factory to the front, and got to thinking along the way about the similarities between air flowing over the wings of a plane and air moving through the human lung.

"In that lung is rudimentary air foils. It's like a million airplane wings all down through the lungs. In and out, all the way through, that facilitate your normal, spontaneous breathing. So it was just applying all this," Bird explains. "Taking it from aviation."

It sounds simple enough, a concept even school kids can grasp. But in reality, the human lung works with mind-numbing complexity. For his own education, the military sent Bird to medical school. And though his studies took him to the outer limits of science, his next respirator was still definitely low tech.

For example, he used strawberry shortcake tins to construct one of his early machines. "And what I did was, I put a diaphragm in here so that when you did that, it would drop the pressure and this magnet would grab it and hold it off," he explains.

Back then, there weren't many options for people with respiratory problems. The worst cases required iron lungs, which were big, primitive, expensive and confining.

So Bird kept on trying to develop a small, affordable device that could automatically help people breathe. His breakthrough came in the late 1950s with the "Bird Mark 7" respirator, a device so effective the Air Force made a training film about it, with Hollywood music and all.

"We were able to assist your respiration. We could control it," Bird explains.

The respirator, Bird says, became standard use "throughout the entire world."

"And still today, there's tens of thousands of these still functioning around," he says.

Improved models quickly followed; his respirator for premature infants, the "Baby Bird," massively reduced the death rate for preemies.

Bird's neighbor, Donna Turnbull, got to experience the importance of the invention first-hand. "It's an amazing situation and a good happy ending," she recalls.

Donna and her husband Bob have good reason to thank him for his Baby Bird respirator. "It had been snowing. And there was a black sheet of black ice on the highway. And we hit it, and so did another pickup truck. And it ran right into us," she recalls.

Donna was in labor and Bob was driving her to the hospital that day in 1985. The accident nearly killed her. And doctors first thought the baby, Tim, was gone.

"They wouldn't look me in the eye. And I thought, 'Well, what's going on? What's wrong?'" Bob recalls.

"The doctors pronounced Tim dead. They said he was stillborn," Donna adds.

But when a faint pulse was discovered in the umbilical, baby Tim was hooked up to the Baby Bird. It made him breathe, and it pulled him through.

"I gather the Turnbulls owe a great deal to Forrest Bird," Safer remarks.

"Yeah. Great man," Donna agrees.

The great man, in his late 80s now, is still certified to fly. He lives and works at a breath-taking 300-acre compound on Lake Pend Oreille, just south of the Canadian border. Here, Forrest Bird has invented his own private Idaho.

"I've kind of recreated similar to what I had as a young lad growing up in New England," Bird says. "It's fun. We enjoy it."

Think of it as a combination home, business center, factory, museum and farm. Here, where the deer and the baby buffalo play, Bird routinely works a 12-hour day, conferring with doctors who come from around the world for his expertise, overseeing a staff of 40 who assemble the newest generation of Bird respirators, and writing, lecturing, flying, and still tinkering.

Where does he get the energy from?

Says Bird's second wife Pam, "He has to get it from heaven, because there's days where there's, if I was one day older I don't think I could keep up with him."

Pam met Bird through her work of bringing inventors and investors together. The first time he took her up in a plane, he did some aerial acrobatics. It was love at first flight.

"And he did the spins and the flips," she remembers. "Then when he landed he looked at me and he goes, 'Well, what do you think about that?' And I looked at him and I said, 'Is that all you can do?'"

Forrest Bird admits he was trying to impress Pam. "He was trying to see how much I could take," she says.

His late wife, Mary, had emphysema and was treated on many of Bird's respirators. "She was always my first patient," Bird remembers. "But ultimately, the lung was destroying itself. But we probably gave her a number of years of additional life. And probably it sparked me too in turn to push further and develop."

Bird, a legend in aviation and medicine, is something of a mystery to his Idaho neighbors, which is why he recently invited everyone over for the opening of a museum showcasing his inventions and toys.

There was an air show starring stunt pilot Patty Wagstaff. She did enough spins and flips to put Bird to shame. And she officially opened Bird's museum by cutting a ribbon flying upside down fifteen feet off the runway.

"Wow. You're the greatest. Thank you, Patty," Bird said.

And that's a major compliment coming from someone whose father taught him to fly 75 years ago, who has piloted almost every kind of aircraft there is. Forrest Bird's own private Idaho includes his own private air force.

How many planes does he have in his fleet?

"I think 21," Bird says, laughing. "Helicopters, we have three helicopters. And they're all flyable."

When Safer asked how one guy can use all those planes, Dr. Bird joked that he flies "one at a time."

He's a king size pack rat, collecting and restoring old planes, old cars, even old motorcycles. And they all come with stories. Admire his collection of old Fords, and he'll tell you about meeting the man, Henry Ford, himself in 1930.

Talk about his vintage biplanes, and he'll tell you about meeting, as a teenager, one-half of the Wright brothers, Orville. "And I thought he was God," Bird remembers.

Talk about float planes he has had over the years, and he'll tell you about flying them several times with the 20th century's most mysterious man, Howard Hughes, who, even in his last reclusive days could not resist taking a spin with Forrest Bird.

"He had a stocking cap on, and a beard and so on. And other than basically his voice, I didn't recognize him," Bird remembers. "He says, 'Let's go.' He was a magnificent pilot all the way. And he totally enjoyed it. And we came back and he said, 'Well, how much do I owe you?' I said, 'Mr. Hughes, you know I get great enjoyment out of it.'"

But the flying experience that astonished him most was the encounter he had as a teenager, outside Boston one afternoon in 1937. "I was heading East. And I saw this massive thing in the sky," Bird remembers. "I flew up alongside of it. And I first saw the swastika on the end."

It was the great German Zeppelin Hindenburg, nearing the end of what would be its final voyage. "That was awe inspiring. Truly awe inspiring," he recalls.

Hours later, Bird - and the world - would hear about the explosive end the Hindenburg met when it tried to tie up at Lakehurst, N.J.

"It will be with me all my life," the inventor says.

Over the years, he had a couple of close calls of his own. But fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and this Bird will not be grounded.

"A lot of people might feel just a tad uncomfortable flying with an 86-year-old pilot at the helm. What do you say to people like that?" Safer asks.

"I tell them that the FAA figures that I'm safe," Bird says.

Matter of fact, he says, in some air emergencies, like pulling out of a dive without blacking out, it's the old guy you want at the controls. "We have arterial sclerosis. Now, our young fellow, at 25, will black out faster than we will because our arteries are harder and they're less expansive. So we maintain our blood pressure better. These are facts," Bird explains.

"This is the first case I've ever heard anyone make for hardening of the arteries," Safer remarks.

"Yeah, that's right. But this is fact. I mean absolute fact. Textbook, eh?" Bird says.

Bird says he has no intention of packing it in anytime soon. "They'll pack me in when they put me in a box, right?" he says.

And that seems unlikely any time soon. Bird thrives on work and flying, and on the knowledge of the difference his inventions have made in countless lives. His offices are covered with thank-yous from children and adults saved by Bird respirators.

What is he most proud of?

"I guess, probably, let's say the Baby Bird," the inventor says.

Which brings us back to the Turnbulls, who have not one, but two reasons to thank Forrest Bird. One is Tim, the baby saved from that terrible highway accident. The other is Tim's brother Rob, born two months prematurely. The Baby Bird respirator saved his life as well.

Seeing these two strapping young men as grown-ups produced in Forrest Bird a rare condition: he was almost speechless. "I really am, I'm astounded," Bird says, laughing.

And so we leave bird man, back in the element he loves most, back in the wild blue yonder of Idaho, in the plane his daddy bought in 1939.

"Four, three, two, one, clearing the runway," Bird says at the controls of his plane.
Produced By David Browning