2007: Idaho's Bird Man

60 minutes rewind a viewer wrote us awhile back and said you really should take a look at the life and times of an inveterate named forest bird we did and found in the panhandle of Idaho a remarkable American original over the last eight decades forest bird has seen enough history and rubbed elbows with enough legends to rival that other forest Forrest Gump chances are forest birds 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 it's the annual gathering of the National Inventors Hall of Fame which honors America's visionary tinkerers Patsy Sherman who invented Scots guard to protect the rug and the furniture dr. Harry couvert who invented superglue to hold you stuff together and dr. Klaus Schmeichel who invented prozac to hold your head together and standing tall among them all six foot four of him is forest 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 door knob you can see this doorknob right here at the top so the patient would take and push down like this on the doorknob and blow their lungs up well he did remarkably well with it what year are we talking about we're talking about 1947 did you have any idea then that you're on the trail to a device that would be just the most routine part of emergency medicine there is no sir not the foggiest I mean this was seeing a problem and coming up with a rudimentary answer that was all yeah and that answer came from one of this tinkerers passion 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 1 pilot and I just wanted to be able to fly like he did bird spent World War two 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 law in that lung as rudimentary air foils like a millionaire airplane wings all down through the lungs in and out all the way through the facilitate your normal but spontaneous breathing so it was just applying all of this taking it from aviation ok put that on the end here 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 forest bird to medical school and though his studies took him to the outer limits of science his next respirator was still definitely low-tech these are strawberry shortcake tens here you're kidding no I am not honest to god miss Robert K tens they really are 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 or a child with polio and minutes breathing can mean his life back then there weren't many options for people with respiratory problems the worst cases required iron lungs big primitive expensive and confining so forest bird kept on trying to develop a small affordable device that could automatically help people breathe his breakthrough came in the late 1950s the mark 7 respirator the device so effective the Air Force made a training film about it Hollywood music and all we were able to assist your aspiration we could control it and this became standard use throughout the entire world and still today there's tens of thousands of these still functioning around improved models quickly followed thanks to his respirator for infants the baby bird the death rate for preemies was massively reduced it's amazing situation and a good happy ending Donna Turnbull and her husband Bob neighbors of forest bird 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 was in labor bob was driving her to the hospital that day in 1985 the accident nearly killed her and doctors first thought the baby Tim was God they wouldn't look me in the eye and I thought oh what's going on what's wrong the doctors pronounced Tim dad said he was stillborn but when a faint post 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 Turnbow so a great deal to the forest bird without forest bird the story will continue after this the great man is 86 now still certified to fly he lives and works at a breathtaking 300 acre compound on Lake Pend Oreille just south of the Canadian border here forest bird has invented his own Private Idaho I kind of recreated similar to what I had as a young lad growing up in New England it's almost a fantasy this place it's fun we enjoy it think of it as a combination home business center factory Museum and farm there were 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 assembled the newest generation of bird respirators writing lecturing flying and still tinkering where does he get the energy from 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 his second wife Pam met bird through her work 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 and when we had 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 I'm just trying to see how much I could take his late wife Mary had emphysema and was treated on many of birds respirators she was always my first patient but ultimately the lung was destroying itself but we probably gave her a number years of additional life and probably it sparked me too and turned to push further and develop he's a legend in aviation and medicine 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 his toys [Music] there was an Air Show Starring stunt pilot patty wagstaff she did enough spins and flips to put forest bird to shame and she officially opened Burt's museum by cutting a ribbon flying upside down 15 feet off the runway [Applause] Wow hear that greatness Thank You Faye and that's a major compliment coming from someone whose father taught him to fly 75 years ago who's piloted almost every kind of aircraft there is forest birds Own Private Idaho includes his own private Air Force how many planes you know I think twenty-one helicopters we have three helicopters the rest air and they're all flyable you use always planes yes I was one guy named fly one at a time he's a king-sized 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 himself Henry Ford 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 now these are and fibia Sloat's talk about float planes he's 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 nothing basically his voice I didn't recognize him 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 wow much so I said mr. Hughes you know I get great joy monado 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 I flew up alongside of it and I first saw the Swat sticker on the end and then I came back was the great German Zeppelin Hindenburg nearing the end of what would be its final voyage that was on spectrally inspiring hours later bird and the world would hear what happened with the Hindenburg tied up at Lakehurst New Jersey it'll be with me all my life over the years he had a couple of close calls of his own fish got to swim and 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 tell them that the FAA figures that I'm safe matter of fact he says in some air emergencies pulling out of a dive without blacking out for instance it's the old guy you one of the controls we have arteriosclerosis now a young feller 25 will black out faster than we will because our arteries are harder and they're less expensive so we maintain our blood pressure better this is the first case I've ever heard anyone make for hardness I mean absolute fact textbook hey you have no intention of packing it in go away they'll pack me and when they put me in a box and that seems unlikely any time soon forest 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 are you most proud of I guess probably let's say the baby bird which brings us back to the Turnbull's who have not one but two reasons to thank for us 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 you caught me flat-footed this morning seeing these two strapping young men as grown-ups produced in forest bird a rare condition he was almost speechless and so we leave Birdman back in the element he loves most back in the wild blue yonder of Idaho in the plane his daddy bought in 1939 [Music] you

Channel: 60 Minutes

Views: 85,913

Keywords: 60 Minutes, CBS News, bird man, idaho, forrest bird, pilot, idea, wing, morley safer, reports, medical respirator

Id: JfwOhTo_3Gs

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 06 2019