Charles Turner's Super Power (and it's not his 'stache)

Successful people sometimes talk about their "Big Break."  The moment that made the big difference in their life.

What's rare, however, is hear about successful people who mainly have "Bad Breaks."  Meet Charles Henry Turner.  Many discoveries about how insects communicate with each other and how they think come from the crazy-creative shoe-string experiments and research papers of Turner.  

Born in 1967 -- right after the Civil War -- Turner was a standout zoology student at the University of Cincinnati and is thought to be the first African-American PhD graduate from the Univeristy of Chicago.

Despite a strong start, he was never able to find a University professorship and instead taught high school biology in St. Louis until passing away at 56.

Interestingly, there's not any record of him complaining about being overlooked, passed over, or not having a  Big Break.   He must have been too busy.  For 30 years, he kept his passion, and he stayed the course of the mission he saw for himself.

For these 30 years he continued to think to ask out-of-the-box research questions -- like, can insects hear? can they think? and how do they solve new problems?  Then he'd design of ingenious experiments to test his ideas.  He would then spend his nights collecting data, and he'd spend his weekends writing and publishing scientific papers in some of the best journals in his field.  Still, no university every hired him.

No big break, mainly bad breaks. Still he didn't complain, he kept working, and he kept his "eyes on the prize."

That seems to be his super power and why 100 years later he stands so tall above all of those who were hired instead of him.  

​There's an inspiring article on him in the Feb 2024 American Scientist. 

Charles Turner's Super Power Legacy
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