Raymond Damadian
Damadian received a National Medal of Technology in 1988 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1989. His original MRI full-body scanner was given to the Smithsonian Institution in the 1980s and is now on loan and on display at the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Ohio. In 2001, the Lemelson-MIT Prize Program bestowed its $100,000 Lifetime Achievement Award on Damadian as "the man who invented the MRI scanner."
Forrest Mims
Mims pursued his electronics avocation while at A&M. His great-grandfather was blind, and this led Mims to create a travel aid for the blind. This device was similar to RADAR, except it used the newly developed infrared-emitting diode to send intense pulses of light that reflected from obstacles. The returned light was converted to an audio tone that increased in amplitude as the distance to the obstacles was reduced. The infrared diodes had just been introduced by Texas Instruments in 1965 and sold for $365 each. Mims visited Dr. Edwin Bonin of Texas Instruments and explained his project. After reviewing the finished design, Dr. Bonin sent Mims three infrared-emitting diodes.