In 1920s, a Kansas farm boy built his own telescope from scrap. Years later, he discovered a planet

Before being recognised as the person who discovered Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh was a young Kansas farmer with little money for astronomical equipment and no college degree. Rather of giving up on his obsession with the night sky, he constructed his own telescopes out of abandoned farm equipment and even an old Buick. He finally moved from a family farm to Lowell Observatory and made one of the most well-known astronomical discoveries of the 20th century thanks to those homemade devices.

He Couldn't Simply Buy the Telescope He Wanted

Born in Illinois in 1906 and raised on a farm in Kansas, Tombaugh developed an early fascination with astronomy. After using his uncle's telescope to view the Moon and Saturn, he started making his own instruments. Despite having little money, Tombaugh was resourceful. According to Lowell Observatory, he built his homemade 9-inch telescope between 1927 and 1928 using components from agricultural equipment, such as a cream separator and grain auger, as well as an axle from an early Buick car. NASA notes that the telescope's mount incorporated part of the crankshaft from a 1910 Buick along with discarded cream-separator components.

His Drawings Unexpectedly Led to a Job

The homemade telescope was good enough for Tombaugh to make detailed observations and drawings of Mars and Jupiter. He sent some of those drawings to Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, hoping professional astronomers would comment on his work. Instead, observatory director Vesto Slipher offered the 23-year-old farmer a job. Lowell Observatory was preparing to renew its hunt for the mysterious "Planet X", a world astronomer Percival Lowell had believed existed beyond Neptune. Tombaugh arrived at Lowell in January 1929.

His Job Was to Search Through Thousands of Stars

Finding the suspected planet required enormous patience. Tombaugh photographed the same areas of the sky several days apart using Lowell's 13-inch astrograph. He then examined pairs of photographic plates using a blink comparator, which rapidly switched between images. Stars remained stationary, but a nearby object moving through the solar system would appear to jump between positions. After months of painstaking work, Tombaugh noticed exactly that. On February 18, 1930, while examining photographic plates taken weeks earlier, he spotted a tiny object that had moved against the background stars.

The Tiny Dot Became Pluto

After further observations confirmed the discovery, Lowell Observatory announced the new world on March 13, 1930. It was subsequently named Pluto. The discovery was extraordinary for another reason: Tombaugh had found Pluto before he ever attended college, according to NASA. Pluto was regarded as the solar system's ninth planet for more than seven decades before the International Astronomical Union reclassified it as a dwarf planet in 2006.

From Farm Scraps to Astronomy History

Tombaugh did not discover Pluto with his homemade telescope the actual discovery was made using Lowell Observatory's specialised 13-inch instrument. But the telescope he built back on the Kansas farm was crucial: it allowed him to develop his skills, create the planetary drawings that impressed Lowell and ultimately secure the job that changed his life.

His story began with spare machinery, dark Kansas skies and a determination to build what he could not easily afford. A few years later, the self-taught young astronomer was staring at two photographic plates when a moving speck of light revealed a world humanity had never recognised before.