Bill Nye

Nye was born November 27, 1955, in Washington, D.C., to Jacqueline Jenkins (1921–2000), who was a codebreaker during World War II, and Edwin Darby "Ned" Nye (1917–1997), who also served in World War II and worked as a contractor building an airstrip on Wake Island. He is related to William Foster Nye, founder of Nye Lubricants in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Ned was captured and spent four years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp; living without electricity or watches, he learned how to tell time using the shadow of a shovel handle, spurring his passion for sundials. Jenkins-Nye was among a small elite group of young women known as "Goucher Girls", alumnae of Goucher College in Towson, Maryland, whom the Navy enlisted to help crack codes used by Japan and Germany. "She wasn't Rosie the Riveter, she was Rosie the Top-Secret Code Breaker", Nye recalls. "People would ask her what she did during World War II and she'd say, 'I can't talk about it, ha ha ha!'" Nye attended Lafayette Elementary School and Alice Deal Middle School before attending Sidwell Friends School for high school on a scholarship, graduating in 1973. After graduating from Sidwell Friends, he attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he studied at the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. His enthusiasm for science deepened after he took an astronomy class with Carl Sagan at Cornell. In 1977, Nye graduated from Cornell University with a BS in mechanical engineering.After graduating from Cornell, Nye worked as an engineer for the Boeing Corporation and Sundstrand Data Control near Seattle. At Boeing, he invented a hydraulic resonance suppressor tube used on Boeing 747 airplanes. He applied four times, unsuccessfully, for NASA's astronaut training program.