Clyde Tombaugh Quotes

• You wonder about it and wonder how will I make an instrument that can handle this kind of a problem.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Kind, Wonder, Problem

• You have to compete with others in the field. Sometimes the competition gets pretty fierce because you’re competing for funds or grants to do your work, the financial work.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Work

  Tags in Pretty, Sometimes, Financial

• When I was in the fourth grade, I became intensely interested in geography and I learned it well.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Learned, Interested, Intensely

• What you do is, you have your drawing board and a pencil in hand at the telescope. You look in and you make some markings on the paper and you look in again.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Again, Paper, Drawing

• We were suddenly faced with the necessity of training a lot of young men in the art of navigation.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Suddenly, Necessity

• Unfortunately, a lot of the concepts in the Bible are based on ancient mythology that doesn’t fit the findings of science.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Science, Unfortunately

• To me, the noise of a threshing machine is better music than a lot of music I hear nowadays. I took a man’s place in the threshing crew when I was only 14 years old.

  Clyde Tombaugh

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Music, Better, Machine

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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 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 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 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 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 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

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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