Fatherhood Quote by Clyde Tombaugh

You can hear a whole origin story hiding in the plainness of “I guess.” Tombaugh isn’t mythologizing himself; he’s understating, which makes the admission feel more trustworthy. The line is built on two objects - telescopes and steam engines - that seem to belong to different worlds: one points outward to the cold abstraction of planets, the other inward to heat, soot, and moving parts. Put together, they sketch the specific kind of mind that finds wonder in both the distant and the mechanical: curiosity with a toolkit.

The context matters. Tombaugh didn’t come up through an elite pipeline; he grew out of early-20th-century American farm and machine culture, where engineering was often learned by touch, not credential. His father on a threshing rig steam engine isn’t sentimental background detail. It’s a quiet claim about apprenticeship: science as something you inherit through proximity, through watching work happen and wanting to understand how it holds together. “I loved the machinery” is the emotional key, because it frames technology not as cold utility but as fascination - a pleasure in systems, gears, and cause-and-effect.

Subtextually, Tombaugh is also making a defense of applied knowledge. The same attentiveness that keeps a steam engine running can be redirected to the patient, repetitive labor of scanning the sky - the kind of meticulous observation that led him to discover Pluto. This is genius rendered unromantic: not lightning bolts, but the long intimacy with instruments.