Tom Johnson

Who was Tom Johnson?

Thomas James Johnson or Tom Johnson was an American electronics engineer and astronomer who founded Celestron, a company which manufacturers telescopes, which revolutionized the amateur astronomy industry and hobby. Sky & Telescope magazine has called him, "among the most important figures shaping the last half century of amateur astronomy."

Johnson was born in 1923. He served as a military radar technician during World War II.

In 1955, Johnson, an engineer, established Valor Electronics, which produced electronics for military and industrial use. Valor, which was headquartered in Gardena, California, had more than one hundred employees by the early 1960s.

Johnson, who had a strong interest in amateur astronomy, originally created Celestron as the "Astro-Optical" division of Valor Electronics in 1960. Around 1960, Johnson had been looking for a telescope which could be used by his two sons, but found no such child friendly models on the market at the time. Johnson built a new telescope, a 6-inch reflector telescope, by himself, in 1960. Richardson Medal