professor proton
Mr. Wizard. There wasn’t much else at the time. I’m not sure if I watched the show because I had a genuine interest in science or because I had a crush on Stacy. (Please understand I was very young at the time).
Oh, and Bill Nye.
I always seemed to catch the tail end of his show. It was much, much later that I learned it was only a ~five minute segment. :smack:
I’d like to add Square One to the list. Math goes with science, right?
If the “growing up” aspect of the question is directed at early childhood then I have to consider the pre-TV years. If it’s TV “science guys” we’re after then I’d have to say mine would be Mr. Wizard.
Otherwise, I’d have to appeal to the radio shows and most likely Big Jon and Sparkie (Saturday mornings) even though I can’t name anybody specific from the show. I just know that there was a wide variety of people of all categories to be guests on the show and I can’t imagine there not being at least one “science guy.”
Mr. Wizard was the ONLY science guy around when I was a kid – literally. I still remember some of his shows
I received a huge box full of old Science Digests from the early 1950s from my scientist uncle, and was surprised to se that he had been around even then doing his thing. His original show aired 1951-1965, there was a Canadian revival in 1971, then a new US show on Nickelodeon from 1983-1990. The puppet Penguins on Beakman’s World, “Don” and “Herb” were named after him (“Mr. Wizard” was in real life “Don Herbert”)
I remember watching Mr Wizard when I was a real little kid (I was born in 1955), and I remember the revival, though I don’t think it lasted long. I can recall one episode where he showed how the Indians were able boil water in birchbark kettles:
Mr Wizard: … And why doesn’t the birchbark burn?
Junior Lab Assistant: Because … because … the water lowers the … “kindling temperature”?
Mr Wizard: That’s right! 
Oh yes, Magnus was always huge fun to watch. But Raymond Baxter on Tomorrow’s World edges him out.
I was a big David Bellamy fan until he became a lunatic climate change denier 
There was an article about Pykrete (and the iceberh aircraft carrier) in one of those 1950s Science Digests.
Didn’t know about Magnus Pyke, though, living in the States.
They tested Pykrete on Mythbusters, reasonably satisfactorily. Geoffrey Pyke was one of the great British eccentrics, who led one those lives that you couldn’t film because it would be dismissed as too far-fetched*, although it ended sadly. And it seems Magnus was his cousin, not his brother.
*He proposed a pneumatic tube for transporting suitably drugged soldiers:
I vaguely remember Mr Wizard, but he would have had to have been on repeats. It was Bill Nye by adolescence.