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Clyde Tombaugh
Discoverer of Planet Pluto
I did not know that I had recorded the image of Pluto on those plates, not until I scanned them later in February. You passed your gaze over all these stars that you have to be conscious of seeing every star image, because you don't know which one's going to shift, if they shift. It's very tedious work and you go through tens of thousands of star images. I came to one place where it actually was, turned the next field and there it was! Instantly, I knew I had a planet beyond the orbit of Neptune because I knew the amount of shift was what fitted the situation. That was the most instantaneous thrill you can imagine. It just electrified me!
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Charles Townes
Inventor of the Maser & Laser
I really wanted to work in a university. I wanted to teach, and hopefully be able to do research. Teach in a university where I could do research, that was my goal, and I looked very hard, but this was the Depression, and the Bell Laboratories people offered me a job. They were just beginning to offer people jobs again, so it was the latter part of the Depression. This was 1939 and they offered me a job, and the professor with whom I worked said, "Look, that's a job, you ought to take it, there won't be many more." I wasn't all that eager. I knew Bell Laboratories was a fine place, but it wasn't a university. So I went, and I learned an enormous amount. It put me in good contact with electrical engineering, for example, particularly during the World War. I worked on radar, learned a lot about microwaves, and out of that has grown a great deal of my own research, which is typical. You project forward on what you know already. And getting intimately acquainted with engineering -- engineering techniques, electronics in particular -- has been very important to my career. Bell Laboratories was just a wonderful place to work. And afterwards, sometime after the war then, I had an opportunity to go to a university, which I did.
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Charles Townes
Inventor of the Maser & Laser
Charles Townes: I think first one has to learn the field thoroughly enough so that you can see the things that are promising. That means you work with somebody else who's an expert, try to learn from them, you take classes, you learn everything you can. At some point, you've learned enough that then you can perhaps be clever and wise about what next to do. And once you start doing that then, for me at least, everything sort of grows out of the things before. You take whatever experience you have, and that's true of course of all of life, you take whatever experience you have, and you project it forward, and what new things you might do with that expertise or knowledge or experience and judgment. I would say, in a sense, almost everything I have done, while it may seem very different scientifically, it really is a continuous stream of things, branching off here and there, you see, in various directions, but still very closely connected.
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Ted Turner
Founder, Cable News Network
There are certain things, like growing radishes, that technology hasn't really changed very much, but television, I feel like it was a pretty high tech business. Certainly it was in the early days of television, and I just kept up with what was going on technologically and took advantage of the new equipment and new ways of doing things from the very beginning. In business, or in life -- or in military engagements, which I'd studied a lot -- it's the old saying, "Get there firstest with the mostest," and so forth. And that's what I tried to do in business, and I did, because the record speaks for itself. I started with virtually nothing. In 1970, which was my first year in the television business, we had 35 employees at the station in Atlanta, and we did $600,000 in business. Thirty-five employees. When I merged with Time Warner in 1995, which was 25 years later, we had 12,000 employees, and we did two-and-a-half billion dollars. Instead of losing a million dollars, which we did the first year, we made close to $250 million profit, and that was in 25 years.
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Ted Turner
Founder, Cable News Network
I got some of the advertisers that leased the billboards over a year's period of time to prepay me, for a discount, and I sold some stock to some of the employees. I had already worked at the company for 12 years, at different parts of it. So I knew the billboard business inside and out when I was 24 years old. My father had explained how it worked to me over the years and I hit the ground running because I had already had the experience of most 40-year-old people when I was 24.
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Ted Turner
Founder, Cable News Network
I'd had all of the experience. I knew the business inside and out, and I had worked hard at it and studied it. It was relatively easy. It was much simpler to understand. Basically, with billboards, you go out and lease the location. In those days, we tried to pay $25 a year for a location, and then you put the billboard up, and then you went and rented it to an advertiser for $25 a month, and you maintained it. You made sure that the lights were burning at night, and that the weeds were cut in front of it and it was maintained, and hopefully, between your income and your outgo, if you could keep your signs leased most of the time, you'd make a profit. That was it. It's very simple. The television business was much more complicated because of satellite and cable TV that were brand new when I got into the business. No one had really utilized them very much, hardly at all.
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