He was the typical geek of a kid that you might expect him to have been. He spent his after-school hours tutoring other kids in math. He loved to read. When he wasn’t reading, he was riding his bicycle – or, more often, taking it apart to see how it worked.
Growing up in Washington, DC, he’s not really sure when he realized that he was born into a family of people who were laughed at. “My family is funny. I mean funny in the sense that we make people laugh, not just funny looking.”
As one might guess, his love of learning and math and all things mechanical, especially air and space travel, led to a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University. Afterwards, he headed west to Seattle to work as an engineer for Boeing.
Did he make an impact at Boeing? To that he replies,
“There’s a hydraulic resonance suppressor tube on the 747 horizontal stabilizer drive system that I like to think of as
my tube.”
But, this engineer’s greatest impact would be in academia, not in industry. After leaving Boeing, he went on to teach more children about science and engineering than anyone else in the country.
Who is this engineer that everybody laughs at?
Bill Nye … or as you would probably better recognize him … “Bill Nye the Science Guy” … is on what he calls a mission to make our society more science-literate. He manages to do so by combining his talents as a tutor, an engineer and scientist, and as a comedian.
Nye was still working every day full time at Boeing when he took a night job as a standup comedian after winning a Steve Martin look-alike contest. It wasn’t long until he quit his day job and took a fulltime position as a writer/comedian with a Seattle comedy group. During this time, the character “Bill Nye the Science Guy” was born.
From local TV in Seattle, he moved on to his five-day-a-week “Science Guy” show on PBS. He now hosts TV programs on both PBS and the Science Channel. Perhaps more important to him is his work with the EarthDial Project, a series of sundials located around the globe linked by the World Wide Web. People all over the world learn about geography, astronomy and the history and future of time keeping from this organization.
Bill Nye the Science Guy is also a lecturer at his alma mater, Cornell University and holds two honorary Doctorate degrees. And, by the way, it’s still OK to laugh at him, especially when he shows you a copy of the Periodic Table of the Elements that he carries in his wallet.
A typically-funny clip from Bill Nye the Science Guy
