Clyde Tombaugh
Clyde Tombaugh
Clyde William Tombaughwas an American astronomer. He discovered Pluto in 1930, the first object to be discovered in what would later be identified as the Kuiper belt. At the time of discovery, Pluto was considered a planet but was later reclassified as a dwarf planet. Tombaugh also discovered many asteroids. He also called for the serious scientific research of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth4 February 1906
CountryUnited States of America
When the temperature is freezing, it's a bit hard on your fingers, but I was interested in putting down what I saw. And that's what paid off.
They would get books on astronomy out of the city library for me. They would allow me stay up late at night to look at things in the sky.
You wonder about it and wonder how will I make an instrument that can handle this kind of a problem.
Although my early equipment was very modest, later I made my own and they were more powerful.
What you do is, you have your drawing board and a pencil in hand at the telescope. You look in and you make some markings on the paper and you look in again.
We were suddenly faced with the necessity of training a lot of young men in the art of navigation.
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 shed many a tear when the steam engines went out of style on the railroads. I'd like to seem them come back, but I realize the diesels are more efficient.
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.
That's the way I got along in life. I don't ever remember being particularly jealous of anybody, because I figured if I can't do it myself, I don't deserve to get it.
By the time I was in sixth grade I could bound every country in the world from memory.
I guess the two things I was most interested in were telescopes and steam engines. My father was an engineer on a threshing rig steam engine and I loved the machinery.
You have to have hope. Otherwise, I don't think you could handle it. Of course, you have to have both luck and pluck to make it.
I doubt that the phenomenon was any terrestrial reflection, because... nothing of the kind has ever appeared before or since... I was so unprepared for such a strange sight that I was really petrified with astonishment.