Growing up in New York City, Lilienfeld was interested in physical science, but something really caught his attention. “Although my love for natural science never waned,” he said, “I eventually fell in love with the mysteries of the internal world — the human mind — even more than those of the external world.” After receiving … Read more
From This is True for 4 October 2020
Born in Manchester, England, Evans found his profession at age 16: he became a newspaper reporter for a weekly in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire. His career was sidelined by a three-year stint in the Royal Air Force; upon his return he studied economics and politics, and upon graduation in 1952 he was hired as an editor of … Read more
From This is True for 27 September 2020
Growing up, Gore’s father Bill worked at the DuPont (Chemical Co.) Experimental Station in Wilmington, Del., so perhaps it’s not surprising Bob studied chemical engineering. One of the materials Bill worked with in 1957 was PTFE — polytetrafluoroethylene, or Teflon, which DuPont scientist Roy Plunkett had invented, and he was having trouble getting it to … Read more
From This is True for 20 September 2020
From around 1905 through the early 1970s, the federal and state governments in Australia forcibly took aboriginal children, along with Torres Strait Islanders, from their homes and families to bring them up in “Christian” surroundings: they were known as the Stolen Generations. Cubillo was one of those children, carried away from her home as a … Read more
From This is True for 13 September 2020
An artist, Nichols studied visual animation at the California Institute of the Arts, and went to work on TV and film, starting with Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies, where she was part of the team that won an Emmy award, and then going to work with a different studio — Disney, hired to work on Beauty … Read more
From This is True for 6 September 2020
Born in Ohio to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, Spielberg had a fascination with radios, building his first receiver at 9; at 15, he built a transmitter to enable him to talk to others as a ham radio operator. With the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Spielberg joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and although he … Read more
From This is True for 30 August 2020
As a child, Singer was taught violin, but as a teen he switched to clarinet, and then his final instrument of choice: tenor sax. Singer was born in the “Greenwood District” of Tulsa, Okla. — a “freedom colony” of African Americans that thrived: it was known as “Black Wall Street” …which was burned to the … Read more
From This is True for 23 August 2020
The son of immigrants from Russia and Hungary, Kirsch was born in New York City, and attended the Bronx High School of Science, New York University (Bachelor of Electrical Engineering, 1950), Harvard (Master of Science, 1952), and later did graduate work at MIT. In 1951 he accepted a position at the U.S. National Bureau of … Read more
From This is True for 16 August 2020
After growing up on a farm in Peru, N.Y., Allen went to college to be a teacher. With a bachelor’s in mathematics in hand, she returned to her home town to teach. But she yearned for more, and went to the University of Michigan for a master’s in math, but was left in such debt … Read more
From This is True for 9 August 2020
A computer engineer, after release from the U.S. Navy in the late 1950s, English joined the staff of the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International). In 1963, co-worker Douglas Engelbart (Honorary Unsubscribe, 7 July 2013) came up with a new way to interact with a computer, and English took his notes and created the first prototype: … Read more
From This is True for 2 August 2020