Early Career
While he was a physics professor at Iowa Wesleyan College he recognized James Van Allen as a student and put him to work, at 35 cents an hour, preparing seismic and magnetic equipment for the Antarctic Expedition.
He was second in command on the Second Byrd Antarctic Mission to the South Pole with Richard E. Byrd. The Poulter Glacier was named after him by Admiral Byrd. Byrd credited him with saving his life as the expedition leader approached death from carbon monoxide poisoning.
After his first expedition he became the Scientific Director of the Armour Research Foundation at the Armour Institute of Technology (later Illinois Institute of Technology) where he developed the Antarctic snow cruiser (a.k.a. "Penguin 1"). This device was built for and taken along on his second expedition with Admiral Byrd in 1939.
Read more about this topic: Thomas Poulter
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or career:
“Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten in the age of perversions of Dewey-style education: everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper.”
—Gerald Early (b. 1952)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)