Clyde Tombaugh Quotes

• Although my early equipment was very modest, later I made my own and they were more powerful.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Powerful, Modest

• I have a lot of sympathy for young people because I realize how disturbed I was. How would I deal with life in the future? What would I do for a living?

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Sympathy

  Tags in People, Realize

• Can you imagine young people nowadays making a study of trigonometry for the fun of it? Well I did.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in People, Imagine, Fun

• By the time I was in sixth grade I could bound every country in the world from memory.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Country, Memory

  Tags in World

• A person that much interested in science is going to neglect his social life somewhat, but not completely, because that isn’t healthy either. So one has to work it out according to one’s own inclinations, how one wants to proportion these things.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Person, Interested, Things

• How does a pansy, for example, select the ingredients from soil to get the right colors for the flower? Now there’s a great miracle. I think there’s a supreme power behind all of this. I see it in nature.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Great, Example, Think

• I guess they just took it for granted that that was what I was interested in and let nature take its course.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Nature

  Tags in Interested, Guess, Granted

• I guess the two things I was most interested in were telescopes and steam engines. My father was an engineer on a threshing rig steam engine and I loved the machinery.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Father

  Tags in Interested, Engine, Things

• I realized that I would have some very tough sledding, and I was very discouraged because I didn’t see much hope of getting into the field I wanted to get into with no college education.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Education

  Tags in Realized, Wanted

• I think there’s a supreme power behind the whole thing, an intelligence. Look at all of the instincts of nature, both animals and plants, the very ingenious ways they survive. If you cut yourself, you don’t have to think about it.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Intelligence, Nature

  Tags in Think, Yourself

• I think the driving thing was curiosity about the universe. That fascinated me. I didn’t think anything about being famous or anything like that, I was just interested in the concepts involved.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Famous, Universe, Anything

• I shed many a tear when the steam engines went out of style on the railroads. I’d like to seem them come back, but I realize the diesels are more efficient.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Realize, Efficient

• I used to believe there were people on Mars, and of course now we know there aren’t. Mars held particular interest. I was curious what kind of beings they would look like.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Believe, Kind, Interest

• I thought I’d better check this third plate, which is another date, see if there’s an image there in the right place that would be consistent with the images on the other plates. That was the final proof.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Better, Thought, Proof

• I used to think about how nice it would be to visit the planets. Of course, I didn’t expect to see in my lifetime what has happened. I knew it would happen some day, but it came along faster than I at first thought.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Think, Expect, Thought

• I was always looking ahead. I used to do all kinds of things for entertainment. When I was young, we had no radio, no TV. We were 30 miles from the public library, out in the sticks in Western Kansas, and so I’d do arithmetic exercises.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Young, Entertainment, Public

• I was interested in telescopes and the way they worked because I had an intense desire to see what things looked like, so I learned how to use telescopes and find things in the sky.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Interested, Desire, Things

• It was depressing, very depressing. I worried about how I would make a living. I didn’t want to stay on the farm. It didn’t offer the challenge I wanted and yet, without a college education, I felt that I was really out of luck.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Education

  Tags in Depressing, Without

• That’s the way I got along in life. I don’t ever remember being particularly jealous of anybody, because I figured if I can’t do it myself, I don’t deserve to get it.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Jealousy, Remember, Myself

• The planets are never the same twice, they’re always different, so they could compare the markings I had drawn with their current photographs and they knew that I was drawing what I was really seeing and it wasn’t copied from somewhere.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Different, Really, Current

Clyde Tombaugh (27)

Birth:	4th February, 1906
Death:	17th January, 1997
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Astronomer

About

Clyde William Tombaugh was born in Streator, Illinois. He was an American astronomer. Although he is best known for discovering the dwarf planet Pluto in 1930, the first object to be discovered in what would later be identified as the Kuiper belt, Tombaugh also discovered many asteroids; he also called for the serious scientific research of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs. Following his discovery of Pluto, Tombaugh earned bachelor's and master's degrees in astronomy from the University of Kansas in 1936 and 1938. He worked at White Sands Missile Range in the early 1950s, and taught astronomy at New Mexico State University from 1955 until his retirement in 1973.

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