Because a hailstorm ruined his family’s 15 acres of oats, he couldn’t afford college; in less than two years, Illinois-born self-taught astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto

It was the summer of 1928 when a 15-minute hailstorm wrecked 15 acres of oats field of the Tombaugh family. The devastation has also ended the eldest child, Clyde Tombaugh’s, dream of going to college, who was 22 at that time.

“Tombaugh continued to study on his own, teaching himself solid geometry and trigonometry,” achievement.org wrote in their memoir of the self-taught astronomer titled, “A Man of Universal Wonder.” It is probably one of the wonderful descriptions we have come across for the man who, in less than two years, discovered our solar system’s 9th planet: now a loving dwarf planet, Pluto.

Clyde, who also had three brothers and two sisters behind him born near Streator, Illinois, on February 4, 1906. According to David H. Levy’s 1991 book, Clyde Tombaugh: Discoverer of Planet Pluto, Tombaugh’s father, Muron, had planted around 15 acres of oats that spring which generaly grows wheat. The crop was promising, sufficient enough to send his eldest to college, Muron thought.


On June 20, however, storm clouds gathered, brought heavy rain and hail for only 15 minutes, which destroyed the crops. He, however, continued to observe the universe.

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A 9 inch homemade telescope

Tombaugh was unimpressed with store-bought instruments, so when he was 20, he built his own, grinding the mirrors himself. In 1928, he assembled a 9-inch reflector telescope with his father’s 1910 Buick crankshaft and parts from a cream separator.

He made some pretty detailed drawings of Mars and Jupiter with the backyard telescope. “He sent these to Vesto M. Slipher, the director of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona,” hoping for some constructive comments, the American Physical Society (APS) wrote. Slipher, impressed by the findings, offered him a job at the observatory: to find Planet X, a hypothetical planet beyond Neptune, with a photographic telescope .

Tombaugh joined the observatory in January 1929. First, he used the telescope to make several photographic plates by taking pictures of different regions of the night sky where Planet X might appear.

For each of the regions, he made two photos, taken several days apart, and this process continued for many cold nights in the unheated observatory dome.

He created many such pairs of plates, then, using a ‘blinking comparator,’ he analyzed the two members of each pair.

“It was incredibly tedious work requiring intense concentration, but Tombaugh greatly preferred it to going back to work on the farm, so he persisted,” APS noted.

“It took the right person with the right amount of focus, because it was a needle in a haystack looking at dots,” Kevin Schindler, Lowell Observatory’s longtime historian and public information officer, told Smithsonian Magazine.

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The dot in the night sky and discovery of a new planet

On February 18, 1930, Tombaugh finally spotted a tiny object that had moved between the photographic plates about 3 mm taken earlier. The distance was around 40-43 AU, outside the orbit of Neptune, the expected range of Planet X.

On March 13, 1930, the discovery was announced. It was chosen to coincide with both the anniversary of Herschel’s discovery of Uranus in 1781 and Percival Lowell’s birthday in 1855, who set it up in 1894 to find Planet X.

Tombaugh later described the moment as “the most instantaneous thrill you can imagine,” he said, according to Achievement.org.

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Naming of Pluto

In late March of 1930, the object was officially named Pluto, which was named after the Roman god of the underworld, who has the power to make him invisible, suggested by an 11-year-old girl from England.

Another reason for naming it Pluto was that the first two letters are Percival Lowell’s initials.

Tombaugh later went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in astronomy from the University of Kansas and even served US Navy during WWII.

Pluto’s status would eventually change after being considered a planet for 75 years. Nine years after Tombaugh’s death in 2006, with worldwide disagreement, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) ‘demoted’ Pluto to a dwarf planet status.

However, his connection to Pluto was honored as NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which carried some of his ashes, flew past the dwarf planet in 2015.