Clyde Tombaugh Interview (page: 2 / 4) Discoverer of Planet Pluto	Print Interview

Explain to me about perseverance and how you learned it.

Clyde Tombaugh: You carry on through even despite of discouraging situations and you never lose sight of the goal. Often, you experience hardships involved like freezing in that cold dome at night, loss of sleep, and that gets pretty wicked, but I was interested in getting the results. It takes a dedication to achieve that kind of thing. A lot of people would give up and quit.
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Any setbacks along the way that were really more serious than others?

Clyde Tombaugh: When I was on the farm, we got hailed out. That meant total lack of money and I couldn't afford to go to college. This was a blow. I realized that I would have some very tough sledding, and I was very discouraged because I didn't see much hope of getting into the field I wanted to get into with no college education. I didn't know anybody particularly important in the field, so I felt I was under a great disadvantage and could hardly hope to do what I did.

How did you deal with that disappointment?

Clyde Tombaugh: It was depressing, very depressing. I worried about how I would make a living. I didn't want to stay on the farm. It didn't offer the challenge I wanted and yet, without a college education, I felt that I was really out of luck.

I just kept on studying and then the breaks came. I kept making telescopes and learning more about optics and that's the knowledge that paid off. I was really preparing myself for a better thing than I realized at the time.

Getting the invitation to go to Flagstaff was a real piece of luck, but the other was preparing myself. I think of the Chinese philosopher, Confucius. He said, "The future belongs to those who prepare for it," and I never forgot that.

So in your way, you were always preparing. Let's relive that experience of when you realized you had discovered a real planet.

Clyde Tombaugh: I was assigned to taking photographs at night with the telescope. It was a wide-angle photographic telescope with a one-hour exposure. I developed the plates and so on, and a few days later I'd put them on a special machine called the Blink-Comparator, where you compared two plates rapidly in alternating views, to see if any change occurred on the star field, from one plate to the other made a few nights later. That was the technique, because these plates would have several hundred thousand star images a piece. That's an awesome thing to look at and realize you had to see, out of all those images, which one moved. The challenge was far more difficult than most people ever realized.

I had some soul-searching questions for myself. Do I want to go through this very tedious job or not? I didn't want to go back to the farm to pitch hay, and I knew I had to do this job or go back to the farm. So I went through some pretty tedious hardship to accomplish this, but I was dedicated and I liked the work really, and I was very, very careful. All the suspects are checked with a third plate. I did the job very thoroughly, and it paid off. Now, I had figured out beforehand, if there was a Planet X, how I would recognize it if I encountered it. So I thought all this out beforehand.

What started you looking for this Planet X?

Clyde Tombaugh: Percival Lowell interpreted some of what they call residuals -- slight irregularities in the orbit of Uranus and Neptune -- as indicative of a mass out there as yet unseen. Like the case of Neptune being discovered mathematically before it was seen.

These residuals were so small that it was questionable whether they were real or not, but they were the best he had. He predicted that there was a planet out there about seven times more massive than the earth, beyond the orbit of Neptune. Of course, Pluto does not have that much mass.

Tell me about the day that you actually discovered the planet Pluto.

Clyde Tombaugh: When I took the photographs, I had no idea that Pluto's image was on those plates, not until I began to scan them carefully some time later. In fact, it was several weeks later when I got to that pair. I had taken the plates of the telescope the previous month, in January, 1930.

I did not know that I had recorded the image of Pluto on those plates, not until I scanned them later in February. You passed your gaze over all these stars that you have to be conscious of seeing every star image, because you don't know which one's going to shift, if they shift. It's very tedious work and you go through tens of thousands of star images. I came to one place where it actually was, turned the next field and there it was! Instantly, I knew I had a planet beyond the orbit of Neptune because I knew the amount of shift was what fitted the situation. That was the most instantaneous thrill you can imagine. It just electrified me!
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That was the 18th of February, 1930, about four o'clock in the afternoon. I realized in a few seconds' flash that I'd made a great discovery, that I'd become famous, and I didn't know what would happen after that. It was a very intense thrill. You don't have that kind of a thrill very often.

Bet you couldn't wait to tell someone.

Clyde Tombaugh: Well at first I had a little sense of caution. I thought I'd better check this third plate, which is another date, see if there's an image there in the right place that would be consistent with the images on the other plates. That was the final proof. Sure enough, it was there. That was when I was 100 percent sure.

Who did you tell first?

Clyde Tombaugh: I told the assistant director [Dr. Lampland] across the hall from me. This machine makes a clicking noise that could be heard in that part of the building. His office was across the hall and he understood the blinking business, too. He'd been involved in some of the earlier searches. He said, "I heard the clicking suddenly stop and a long silence," and he surmised I had run into something. I was checking out the third plate, and here this poor man was sitting at his desk in terrible suspense, waiting to be invited in for a look. I didn't know about that until he told me later. I showed him the plates, the dates and all and that everything seemed to be consistent with putting the object beyond the orbit of Neptune, and then I went down and told the director. He came up and looked and saw. The Lowell Observatory was changed from that day on. Dr. Slipher was the Director. He had gone through the platal field and missed Pluto, one year earlier, missed it on the plates. He wanted to be the one to find Pluto and he failed. I suppose he probably felt a little chagrined, but he knew that I had something because the aspects were very convincing. Then, they got in touch with the observatory trustee, Lowell's nephew who was living in Massachusetts, and told him about it. It was kept secret for a few weeks so we could follow up and we could learn more about it so we published right about when it came out because we knew that when it was announced, there'd be an avalanche, and there was, exceeded what we expected.
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What did the avalanche bring?

Clyde Tombaugh: Newspaper reporters, swarming over us like a bunch of bees - interviewers, photographers and everything. We were all a little bit awed about this. We felt overwhelmed.

So there you were, a young man, already a national hero.

Clyde Tombaugh: International. It puts you in a different category real quickly.

How did you live with the success?

Clyde Tombaugh: It took quite a little adjustment because I didn't expect to live that kind of life. I've been making adjustments to it ever since. People want autographs by the thousands. They want to talk to me. I gave a series of lectures for four years, traveling over the United States and Canada to raise money for Tombaugh scholarship for post-docs in astronomy here at New Mexico State University. We raised close to half a million dollars.

When was this?

Clyde Tombaugh: This happened in the last four years.

How did you name it Pluto?

Clyde Tombaugh: Pluto was the god of the underworld. The lower world, I guess it would be better to say -- of Hades. Pluto's out there far from the sun, where sunlight, at the average distance, is only one sixteen-hundredth as bright as on earth. Rather dark. And if you think of Hades as a dimly lighted place or outer darkness, it kind of fits in somewhat with the characteristics of Pluto probably, or of Hades. So it seemed fairly appropriate from that standpoint. And, then when the satellite of Pluto was discovered in 1978 by Christy at the Naval Observatory, he named it Charon because his wife's name was Charlene. Charon was the boatman who ferried the souls of the dead across the river Styx to Pluto's realm of Hades. So the satellite name fits in very well with Pluto, you see.
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The almanac says that the name came from the initials Percival Lowell.

Clyde Tombaugh: Well, that was another reason, but not the main reason. Of course, they used the first two letters, Percival Lowell. But that was not the main reason. That was somewhat of a coincidence.

How soon did the planet get its name?

Clyde Tombaugh: In April, the following month. We considered many names of course, and Pluto was the final. It was chosen by the staff of the Lowell Observatory. The Lowell Observatory Director proposed to the American Astronomical Society and the Royal Astronomical Society of Great Britain that this name be given to the planet, and both bodies accepted it unanimously. So we knew the name would stick.

Where did your life go from there?

Clyde Tombaugh: Soon after the discovery, there was some apprehension that maybe this object I'd found was only an interloper and that the real Planet X was yet to be found, so they wanted me to go on searching. I searched a lot more of the sky and no Planet X ever showed up. It may be out there, still unseen. Then I got a scholarship to the University of Kansas to go to school and I went to school there from 1932 to 1936. But I'd come out every summer and scan more of these plates, and then I went back two years later and got my Master's degree. All that time, I was searching for the Lowell Observatory.

I took courses in higher mathematics and physics and the sciences and so on, at the University of Kansas. That's where I met my wife, Patricia.

How did you balance your personal life and this intense curiosity and interest?

Clyde Tombaugh: Well you have to kind of work it out. A person that much interested in science is going to neglect his social life somewhat, but not completely, because that isn't healthy either. So, one has to work it out according to one's own inclinations, how one wants to proportion these things.

What particular talent don't you have that you always admired?

Clyde Tombaugh: I would like to have been a better master mathematician than I am. I'm not a slouch either, but I would like to have been better. Probably also more skill in administrative work than I had, although I did a lot of it later. I really had a sense of reasonable satisfaction the way things were going. I had no great regrets, and if I had to do it all over again, I don't know that I'd want it much different. So I have that to be thankful for, but it did take a lot of intense dedication to do that.

Did it take as much dedication even after people recognized your ability?

Clyde Tombaugh: Yes. You have to compete with others in the field. Sometimes the competition gets pretty fierce because you're competing for funds or grants to do your work, the financial work.

How would you explain what you do and what you care about to someone who doesn't know anything about your field? How would you impart to them how exciting it is to them?

Clyde Tombaugh: I like to raise the question, "Have you ever thought about what lies in the sky above you, that earth is not the only place in the universe?" There's a great universe out there. We're only a small part of it. I like to try to raise the curiosity: what is out there in space? A lot of unsolved mysteries. It's a never-ending challenge.

You've devoted many years to teaching as well.

Clyde Tombaugh: Yes. My first experience at teaching was during World War II. I was assigned to teaching navigation in Navy school for seven semesters. I put hundreds of young men though a tough navigation course. It was very overloaded because they didn't have enough teachers.

Astronomers were good candidates for teaching navigation because they understood the basics of navigation theory. A lot of astronomers were pressed into teaching navigation because of the terrible shortage of teachers. We were suddenly faced with the necessity of training a lot of young men in the art of navigation. That's how these things got set up all over the country. They had one at Flagstaff at the Arizona State College at that time.

Let's talk about White Sands now.

Clyde Tombaugh: During the war, I was teaching navigation in the Navy school, and when I wanted to go back to the Lowell Observatory to resume astronomical work, the observatory was short of funds and they let me go. That hurt my feelings, but in the meantime, I was invited to come to White Sands Missile Range to supervise the optical instrumentation. Some of the people thought with my experience with telescopes that I could do that kind of work. It turned out I was just the man for the job.

I came to White Sands in August 1946 and saw almost all the German V2 rockets fired along with our American rockets. I had about 80 men under my supervision; about half of them were military people and others were civil service. My rank in civil service was equivalent to Lieutenant Colonel and I had a big responsibility getting the ballistic data on these rockets.

It was up to me to decide where to put my instruments for the strategic positions to measure these high-speed rockets. It was a real challenge, but we did it. I used a lot of trigonometry out there and knowledge of optics. I designed super cameras and got marvelous results, which really put the White Sands Missile Range on the map. So I had a lot to do with the modern instrumentation of rockets.

Tell me about the satisfactions of changing careers for a while.

Clyde Tombaugh: At first I wasn't sure I'd like it, but the optical problems rather fascinated me. After the war, the Russians turned suddenly unfriendly and that bothered me. We were testing a new brand of rockets and missiles. We needed somebody who knew how to get instrumental data on them in flight and I thought this was where I could make a contribution.

I'm glad I did. We had some dangerously close calls, but it was very challenging, very exciting. I saw a lot of them explode on the launch or in the air. Very spectacular fireworks, I can tell you. These were powerful missiles. I tracked a lot of them myself with satellites and telescopes.

I got thoroughly acquainted with the Army, which I'd never known much about before. I worked with every rank in the Army from the commanding general to the buck private, and I had several military people under my supervision. I designed new instruments for particular jobs of the work which proved to be very successful. In fact, this one instrument which we called the IGOR, meaning Intercept Ground Optical Recording, was a super camera, and they worked so well that they were used at White Sands for the next 30 years before they retired them. Then they got some a little bit bigger of the same kind.

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