People of Science — Charles H. Townes

I regard science in one way or another as the study of the universe, with the outdoors my first inspiration. My friends were primarily my older brother Henry, my cousins, and the lizards, birds, rocks, and insects around our home. Henry was a natural at biology, and I caught much of his enthusiasm. Our parents eventually got used to having snakes in cages outside the house and bits of foliage stashed in our bedrooms, as food for the caterpillars that we wanted to watch transform themselves into chrysalids and eventually butterflies, but which as often as not simply crawled off to explore the house. We had a large aquarium outside for fish, tadpoles, and turtles. Ours was a world of responsibility but also of adventure and imagination — some of my favorite books in our home dealt with self-reliance and living by one’s wits and resourcefulness. Those included Johann Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson, about a shipwrecked family that learns to build a new life on an island, and Ernest Thomson Seton’s Two Little Savages, about a pair of youngsters who learn from an old man how to live off the land.

Most of our play had to do with practical things, building and exploring. I also liked to figure out how things worked. Recently, I came across a letter I wrote to my sister Mary when I was ten. It was mid-December, and I told her, “You asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I want mostly hardware so you better buy out a hardware store. I want some tin shears, some money to buy some iron and wood bits (as I want a particular size I had rather pick out my own), a flat file, a pair of glass cutters, some rifle shot and some one and two penny nails.”

Townes, Charles H.. “How the Laser Happened: Adventures of a Scientist”