The Farm Boy Who Found a World

Clyde Tombaugh was born in Streator, Illinois, and raised on farms in Kansas, the son of a Pennsylvania Dutch farming family. His interest in the sky ignited at age twelve. He could not afford college. In June of nineteen twenty-eight, a hailstorm destroyed his family's crops and closed that door entirely. What Tombaugh could do was build telescopes from spare parts and grind his own lenses by hand.

He began sketching what he saw through those homemade instruments and mailed his drawings of Jupiter and Mars to the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. The staff was impressed enough to offer the twenty-two-year-old a job. He arrived in January of nineteen twenty-nine with no degree, no formal training, and a task that had defeated the entire professional astronomical world: find Percival Lowell's hypothetical Planet X.

The method Tombaugh used was painstaking. He photographed the same section of sky on different nights using the observatory's thirteen-inch astrograph, then ran the plates through a blink comparator. The device alternated rapidly between two images. The distant stars held perfectly still. Anything that had moved between exposures would appear to jump, as though it could not quite decide where to sit.

On February eighteenth, nineteen thirty, Tombaugh was examining plates made the previous month when a faint point of light jumped. He was twenty-four years old. He set down his work, walked into the director's office, and calmly announced that he had found the ninth planet. The discovery was made public on March thirteenth, which would have been Percival Lowell's seventy-fifth birthday. The planet's name was chosen in part because its astronomical symbol combined Lowell's own initials. A Kansas farm boy, working with inherited equipment and borrowed ambition, had completed a dead man's quest.