Leading the Way: Famous Kansans
Inventors, explorers, and scientists are Trailblazers who gain fame by being innovative and venturing to places and arenas where few others have gone.
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Trailblazers
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Martin Johnson
1884 - 1937
Osa Johnson
1894 - 1953
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Through the camera lens Martin Johnson recorded his world. As a photographer, Johnson had traveled from his home in Independence to Chanute to sell photographs at a penny a piece. A chance meeting with a young Osa Leighty marked the beginning of an adventurous partnership. During their 27-year marriage, Osa and Martin traveled around the world photographing wild animals and native people. The life of an explorer is a dangerous one. Once, as Martin was photgraphing a herd of rhinoceroses, one of the animals caught wind of them and charged directly at Martin. With her trademark calmness, Osa raised her rifle, shot, and killed the charging rhino. Martin never missed a second of the action, capturing the dramatic moment on film.
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He could almost see Kansas through the face cover of his silver astronaut suit from 180,000 miles in space. Ron Evans had just finished circumnavigating the moon for a record 147 hours and 48 minutes. Evans was retrieving three canisters of film with images from the landmark flight when he took a moment to locate his hometown of Topeka on the orbiting ball of Earth. Evan's wife volunteered him for the NASA astronaut program in 1966 which led to his selection as a crew member of the Apollo 17 team. Evans carefully observed and described the lunar landscape as he had been trained to do. He punctuated those descriptions with exclamations of joy as he discovered a range of color not before recognized on the lunar surface.
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Ron Evans
1933 - 1990
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Clyde Tombaugh
1906 - 1997
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To Clyde Tombaugh a Kansas root cellar's constant temperature
made it the perfect place to grind the mirrors needed to construct
his telescope. From the Burdett farm where he was raised, young
Tombaugh could watch the sky through his homemade telescope. He
observed the planets Mars and Jupiter, drew sketches of them,
and sent the sketches to the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Impressed
with his imagination and curiosity, the astronomers invited Tombaugh
to work at the observatory where, in 1930, amateur astronomer
Clyde Tombaugh discovered the planet Pluto. When Tombaugh returned
in 1932 to study astronomy at the University of Kansas, he was
not required to take the beginning astronomy class, the class
in which students learned about the discovery of Pluto.
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