Clyde Tombaugh Quotes

I'm fascinated by steam engines and with Victorian engineering generally, and as a corollary to that, I'm fascinated by the idea of long-lived technologies.

In the course of writing 'First Light,' I climbed all over and through the Hale Telescope, where I found rooms, stairways, tunnels, and abandoned machines leaking oil. My notebooks show tooth-marks where I gripped them with my teeth while climbing around inside the telescope, and the notebooks are stained with Flying Horse telescope oil.

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.

In Victorian England, laborers were pushed off the farms, replaced by steam power.

I think Isambard Kingdom Brunel would be a good chap to have supper with. Anyone who builds a railway and then builds a steamship when he gets to Bristol and can't go any further must be a good chap.

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.

All the traditional STEM fields, the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, are stoked when you dream big in an agency such as NASA.

You all know how powerful and varied are the effects of which steam engines are capable; with them has really begun the great development of industry which has characterised our century before all others.

Many Americans have a romanticized view of trains, rooted in a bygone era of elaborately adorned rail cars lit by flickering gas lamps and pulled by smoke-belching steam locomotives.

In the United States three new methods of transportation made their appearance at almost the same time - the steamboat, the canal boat, and the rail car.

In 1854 I took out a patent for puddling iron by means of steam.

We can go into no mechanic shop, into no manufactory of any description, upon no farm or plantation, or travel a mile on our railroads or in our steamboats, without seeing evidence of our originality and witnessing the fruits of our ingenuity and enterprise.

The introduction of so powerful an agent as steam will make a great change in the situation of man.

Soon you’ll be whirled along by steam in a country now only inhabited by wild beasts and Indians

If agrarian society must fall to the machine, at the very least, Iranians should own the machine.

Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book 'The Most Powerful Idea in the World.'

Through machinery, man can exert tremendous powers almost as fantastic as if he were the hero of a fairy tale. Through machinery, man can travel with an ever increasing velocity; he can fly through the air and go beneath the surface of the ocean.

The exciting results from the Hubble, other satellites and probes would not have been possible without innovative solutions to many technical problems.

As soon as I have got flying to perfection, I have got a scheme about a steam engine.

Telescopes and microscopes bring to our view the otherwise unseen and unknown.

I work nights on a farm in the summer when harvest starts. I work on a civil engineering site down the Humber Docks where all the refineries are. So that's my day job from seven to four. And then I build engines at night.

As a kid growing up in a rural area, I was always tinkering with parts and machinery.

I enjoy working on anything mechanical.

Like many astronomers who use the great telescopes on Mauna Kea, I have participated personally and joyfully in ceremonies to celebrate the profound cosmic understanding that comes from joining ancient Hawaiian navigator traditions with the techniques of modern astronomy.

I've always been interested in mechanical things. I think I must have been heavily influenced by my father, who is also very good with his hands. He liked to build things. I always loved to watch him do it, and I loved to build things on my own.