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.
Although my early equipment was very modest, later I made my own and they were more powerful.
Astronomers were good candidates for teaching navigation because they understood the basics of navigation theory. A lot of astronomers were pressed into teaching navigation because of the terrible shortage of teachers.
By the time I was in sixth grade I could bound every country in the world from memory.
Can you imagine young people nowadays making a study of trigonometry for the fun of it? Well I did.
He lived in Nashville. In later years, I went there and saw his telescope, but he was deceased by that time. I had kind of a correspondence with him in earlier years.
He predicted that there was a planet out there about seven times more massive than the earth, beyond the orbit of Neptune. Of course, Pluto does not have that much mass.
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.
I bought a copy and digested it and realized where I'd made mistakes. My next telescopes were much better because I had more information.
I guess he thought it would create awkward academic implications for a discoverer of a planet to be taking beginning astronomy.
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.
I guess they just took it for granted that that was what I was interested in and let nature take its course.
I guess they thought I was a little odd. I was always interested in intellectual things. I was always interested in sports too.
I had a strong sense of responsibility, I wanted to be flexible also, and I just worshipped knowledge and spared no pains to do the job very well. I also had an enormous amount of perseverance. I learned that on the farm.
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?
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.
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.
I showed him the plates, the dates and all, and everything seemed to be consistent with putting the object beyond the orbit of Neptune, and then I went down and told the director. He came up and looked and saw.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was assigned to taking photographs at night with the telescope. It was a wide-angle photographic telescope with a one-hour exposure.
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.
In Popular Astronomy magazine, in 1924, he had a paper with drawings of Jupiter. Beautiful drawings of Jupiter and its markings.
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.
My first experience at teaching was during World War II. I was assigned to teaching navigation in Navy school for seven semesters. I put hundreds of young men though a tough navigation course.
My rank in civil service was equivalent to Lieutenant Colonel and I had a big responsibility getting the ballistic data on these rockets.
Newspaper reporters, swarming over us like a bunch of bees. Interviewers, photographers and everything. We were all a little bit awed about this. We felt overwhelmed.
So that was my natural entrance into astronomy, you see. So I've been interested in that particular area ever since.
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.
The best thing that ever happened was to leave there. I had quite a rewarding life and I got all kinds of honors for my work in science. I also have a prized medal: Pioneer of the White Sands Missile Range.
The first telescope was not so good because I didn't know that much about it, but I learned rapidly. You learn from mistakes.
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.
They always encouraged me and, of course, the day came when I left to go to Arizona, they realized that I was going to do what I really wanted to do: become an astronomer.
They would get books on astronomy out of the city library for me. They would allow me stay up late at night to look at things in the sky.
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.
Unfortunately, a lot of the concepts in the Bible are based on ancient mythology that doesn't fit the findings of science.
We thought they were super intelligent because of the canals of Mars, that they were an old civilization and had learned a lot more than we had.
We were suddenly faced with the necessity of training a lot of young men in the art of navigation.
We were testing a new brand of rockets and missiles. We needed somebody who knew how to get instrumental data on them in flight and I thought this was where I could make a contribution.
Well I realized it more later and then I felt a little bit more proud of myself that I had done better than I thought I was doing.
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.
When I was in the fourth grade, I became intensely interested in geography and I learned it well.
When I was on the farm, we got hailed out. That meant total lack of money and I couldn't afford to go to college.
When the temperature is freezing, it's a bit hard on your fingers, but I was interested in putting down what I saw. And that's what paid off.
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.
You have to have hope. Otherwise, I don't think you could handle it. Of course, you have to have both luck and pluck to make it.
You wonder about it and wonder how will I make an instrument that can handle this kind of a problem.
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