Clyde Tombaugh’s passion for astronomy began in 1918, when he was only 12 years old, after an uncle gave him his first small telescope and a few astronomy textbooks.
However, Tombaugh’s finances didn’t support this passion. After a bad corn harvest in 1920, Tombaugh dropped out of high school for a year to help his family restore their farm in Kansas. Then, in 1928, a hailstorm ruined the family’s crops, along with the young man’s hopes of attending college.
And yet, what Tombaugh lacked in resources, he made up for in determination and ingenuity.
In 1926, he began building his own telescope using objects he found around the farm. According to The Saturday Evening Post, Tombaugh’s makeshift device was made from an axle from his father’s old Buick, metal tubing from a grain elevator, an outdoor water faucet and assorted machine gears.
Using this DIY telescope, Tombaugh was able to make observations of Mars and Jupiter. He sent drawings of those observations to Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, for feedback. Instead, the observatory offered him a job.
Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
His assignment? Find a planet no one had ever seen
By 1929, Tombaugh was tasked with helping to search for Planet X, a mysterious celestial body that Lowell Observatory founder Percival Lowell thought might be responsible for irregularities in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune.
He did this primarily by photographing the same sections of the sky on different nights. Then, using a device called a blink comparator to switch rapidly between the images, he’d look for objects that appeared to move among the stars.
On February 18, 1930, Tombaugh finally spotted it: a tiny dot that had indeed moved across the sky. The elusive Planet X.
“It took the right person with the right amount of focus, because it was a needle in a haystack looking at dots—a dot that moved against the background of hundreds of thousands of dots,” said Kevin Schindler, the longtime historian and public information officer at the Lowell Observatory.
Of course, a few months later, Planet X would be renamed Pluto, thanks to an 11-year-old girl from Oxford, England, named Venetia Burney, whose submission beat out 1,000 other suggestions from around the world. Her cleverness was twofold: Pluto not only kept with the Greek mythology theme of the other planets, but its first two letters also honored Percival Lowell’s initials.
Even though Pluto would be demoted to a “dwarf planet” in 2006, the impact of Tombaugh’s scientific contributions never diminished.
His career spanned decades and included other discoveries, such as stars, star clusters and asteroids—not to mention a few UFOs—as well as a teaching career at New Mexico State University.
In a poetic culmination of his life’s work, when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft finally reached Pluto in 2015, it carried a vial of Tombaugh’s ashes. The man who discovered Pluto came closer to it than any human who had ever lived. A heart-shaped region on the dwarf planet was also named Tombaugh Regio in his honor.
Today, if you find yourself at Lowell Observatory, which is now part science center and part museum, you can see the homemade telescope that helped shape Tombaugh’s destiny.
Tombaugh’s legacy
His discoveries are remarkable, but arguably the most enduring part of Tombaugh’s legacy is his persistence.
Life repeatedly gave him reasons to abandon his dream. Poverty, failed crops, missed schooling—circumstances beyond his control could have ended his journey before it truly began. Instead, he kept looking up and finding a way to do the work with whatever was in front of him.
In the end, Tombaugh didn’t just discover a world at the edge of the solar system. He became a reminder that sometimes the distance between an ordinary life and an extraordinary one is simply the refusal to stop searching.
