Clyde Tombaugh Interview (page: 3 / 4) Discoverer of Planet Pluto	Print Interview

Was this when you became interested in optics?

Clyde Tombaugh: I was always interested in optics. All this came about from what I learned personally working on mirrors back in Kansas.

How old were you?

Clyde Tombaugh: I was 22 when I made my third telescope. The nine-inch was a very successful instrument. You need to have a place where the temperature's constant, like an underground cave, so you don't have thermal problems with the glass when you're working with it. In fact, we had built this cave ourselves years earlier. The farmers like to have a place like that for keeping milk and cream and butter and eggs and stuff. Cool in summer and warm in winter. Also, as a storm protection, because sometimes we had some bad storms and you didn't know if a tornado would come along and blow your house away. The best thing was to get down in that concrete cave. It had a very special purpose, but it was a marvelous optical workshop for me.

I would grind these mirrors. I had two disks of glass. One would be on a stand or a barrel and you rubbed that over with strokes and rotation and so on, so you'd grind the curve into it, you see. And then you'd go through the finer grades and then finally you use rouge and water to polish it. You polish the exact curve at the very last. It's very fine work, and then you have a test for watching and seeing these errors that's unbelievably simple. You can see errors down to within a few millionths of an inch. It's simple, but it's tricky.

You designed something from knowledge that you read in a book, which was equivalent to what scientists use.

Clyde Tombaugh: Yes. The first telescope was not so good because I didn't know that much about it, but I learned rapidly. You learn from mistakes.

Did you realize how much you had accomplished by developing that?

Clyde Tombaugh: No, I didn't think of it that way. I was just driven by the desire to see more things in the sky. That was the driving force. Everything else was secondary.

Was it a surprise to you to find out that you had developed an instrument that was as sophisticated as they come?

Clyde Tombaugh: Well I realized it more later and then I felt a little bit more proud of myself that I had done better than I thought I was doing. But I never thought of it as being particularly difficult. I had to do a lot of thinking about it, but I've always been a thinker. I don't think there was any problem ever that I refused to try to grapple with.

Do you plan the steps and see them happening in your mind?

Clyde Tombaugh: Yes. You wonder about it and wonder how will I make an instrument that can handle this kind of a problem. And you think about it, do a lot more thinking. Sometimes you make mistakes and you go back and do it over. 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.

Do you visualize the end result before you start?

Clyde Tombaugh: Yes. For example, this big telescope out here. I had a vision of the whole thing before I ever put in one single bolt. I calculated the movements of force and balance and so on. I'm somewhat of an engineer too, I guess. I sent my nine-inch mirror to Wichita, Kansas to a French telescope maker to silver my mirror because I didn't have those facilities. He tested my nine-inch mirror and thought it was very high quality, so he offered me a lukewarm invitation to come and help him make telescopes. I could have gone that way.

In the meantime, I was wondering what I would do if I didn't do that. I loved steam engines, so I really had a secret ambition to become an apprentice fireman and a railroad engineer, because I just loved machinery and travel, and I had a profound love of trains. I loved engines and machinery. To me, the noise of a threshing machine is better music than a lot of music I hear nowadays. I took a man's place in the threshing crew when I was only 14 years old. That was during World War I and they were short of manpower and so every boy in his early teens had to take a man's place on the farm with the fieldwork and threshing. That's where I learned to work hard.

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.

What about the career you never had on the railroad?

Clyde Tombaugh: When the offer from Flagstaff came, that all changed all that. I had found something more to my liking so I didn't have any regrets about it. It was just another way out.

You've mentioned two books you read often as a young person: the Bible and the encyclopedia. How did you reconcile the religious beliefs of the Bible with the scientific reading you were doing?

Clyde Tombaugh: Unfortunately, a lot of the concepts in the Bible are based on ancient mythology that doesn't fit the findings of science. So I had to choose one or the other. I regard it as a history in a way, valuable for teaching morals and all of that, but for teaching science, it was no good. It was misleading. That was the attitude I took.

What did that do for your religious conviction?

Clyde Tombaugh: I had a drastic revision in my religion during the Scopes trial in Tennessee. That was 1925. I was 19 then, and I became thoroughly disillusioned with what I considered ignorant, fundamentalist points of view. Our minister would rant and rave against science every Sunday, all summer long. I got thoroughly disgusted with that kind of stupidity. I never got over that. I'm not a Christian at all. I cannot reconcile myself to that point of view. I used to be, but I abandoned it.

You must be a spiritual man.

Clyde Tombaugh: Well I am. I think there's a supreme power behind the whole thing, an intelligence. Look at all of the instincts of nature, both animals and plants, the very ingenious ways they survive. If you cut yourself, you don't have to think about it. Something there heals it, stops the bleeding, puts the scab on. There's something marvelous and miraculous there.

How does a pansy, for example, select the ingredients from soil to get the right colors for the flower? Now there's a great miracle. I think there's a supreme power behind all of this. I see it in nature.

It seems that when people seek contact with a supreme power, they look upward. You spent so much of your life looking up to the skies. Is there any relationship there?

Clyde Tombaugh: Well, of course, heaven is no place in the space out there. I don't know where it would be. There's one place where I think they could say where hell is, that's on the planet Venus because the temperature's 900 degrees and no water and it rains sulfuric acid and the atmosphere is 90 times more oppressive than here, so that's a good place for hell. It's just the next planet over.
[ Video ] Low High    [ Audio ] Quicktime

You've said that as a young person you were kind of a loner. What advice would you give a young person who also feels different and isolated?

Clyde Tombaugh: I have a lot of sympathy for young people because I realize how disturbed I was. How would I deal with life in the future? What would I do for a living? These things worried me considerably. In fact, I could see failure down the road for me. That wasn't very encouraging. But I never gave up hope of trying to be something.

What advice would you give someone with similar feelings to yours?

Clyde Tombaugh: Never give up, be industrious as possible, acquire all the knowledge you can get, be honest, and hope for the future. 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. Some people are not that lucky even though they try and one cannot help but feel sorry for them because they tried and met defeat. Defeat's a terrible feeling.

Tell me about some of the defeats in your life.

Clyde Tombaugh: When I realized I couldn't work at Lowell Observatory anymore, that was kind of a defeat for me. They were short of funds. There were a lot of byproduct materials I wanted to work up after I got done with the scanning. I discovered new star clusters, clusters of galaxies and one great super cluster of galaxies as byproducts. Hundreds and hundreds of new variable stars, hundreds of new asteroids, two comets. I had learned a lot about the distribution of galaxies in the sky. I counted over 29,000 galaxies on my plates and I found that what I saw did not agree with Hubble's view of the galaxies at all. I had arguments with him about that. It turned out I was right, as everybody knows now. If I had stayed, I would have worked all this out a decade earlier than when it was finally worked out as byproducts of the planet search.

It worked out for the best anyway. The best thing that ever happened was to leave there. I had quite a rewarding life and I got all kinds of honors for my work in science. I also have a prized medal: Pioneer of the White Sands Missile Range.

So you look at what you did accomplish and not what you didn't.

Clyde Tombaugh: It was my philosophy all through life. I never had much sense of jealousy.

How does criticism affect you?

Clyde Tombaugh: Well, I never really got much of it. I remember one time at the White Sands Missile Range. They fired the bumper, the two stage rocket which was successful finally after four tries. I could see that the next thing around the corner was the age of multiple stage rockets, and artificial satellites. So I suggested to the various people, we ought to think about how we are going to instrument these things. Oh, he says, you are wasting your time, we are just going to deal with Honest Johns and Nike Missiles and stuff like that. They kind of reprimanded me. Well, a few years later, the Space Age came in, they came around and apologized to me. That was a bit satisfactory, I tell you. They apologized and said, "You saw what we didn't see." That's imagination and curiosity. You can see ahead to what is likely to happen.

You're a scientist, but I want to ask you about intuition, instinct, gut feeling. How does that fit in?

Clyde Tombaugh: I think it's part of being a scientist. You have to have an alertness to deal with the unexpected. The history of science is filled with almost-made discoveries, missed by a hairline because they didn't have the alertness to realize they had a discovery.

Take the case of the French astronomer Lalande in 1795. He was making a star catalog and he was a very careful observer. He would sketch the position of stars in the field, and he'd go back a few nights later to recheck and make sure he hadn't made a mistake. Well he happened to have Neptune in one field on the eighth of May, 1795, and then two nights later he went back and it was in the same place, but in a different position. He thought he'd made an error in the position. He was actually witnessing the movement of planet Neptune and didn't have the alertness to realize that he'd found a planet. He couldn't have had a better clue. Where was his imagination? I find a lot of scientists do not have much imagination and they do not make big discoveries because they miss 'em.

How do they lose their imagination?

Clyde Tombaugh: I don't think they ever had it. There are some people who are just plodders and work right along doing routine stuff and they seem to like it. It's all they're capable of doing, but they do it well. Others have the imagination to see the unknown and interpret the unexpected, so you have these various different kinds of scientists.

How did you develop you own scientific imagination?

Clyde Tombaugh: I was always looking ahead. I used to do all kinds of things for entertainment. When I was young, we had no radio, no TV. We were 30 miles from the public library, out in the sticks in Western Kansas, and so I'd do arithmetic exercises.

For example, I'd calculate how many kernels of wheat were in 10,000 bushels of grain, just for the heck of it, to see how big the number was. I'd even calculate how many cubic inches there were in the super giant star, Betelgeuse. It's one followed by 39 ciphers. I can still read the number. By this, I learned to get a grasp of the meaning of numbers. I see nowadays in media, they say million when they mean billion and vice versa. They don't seem to understand the difference between a million and a billion. It's a terrific difference, a thousand fold difference, and yet they don't seem to have the intuition to realize that that's the wrong answer.

Also, the thing that really pains me is the ignorance of geography among people today. It is astounding. When you have a lot of people who cannot identify the United States on a world map, that's really bad. There's no excuse for that kind of ignorance. People travel a lot, why don't they learn some geography? It's interesting. Then you know where you're going.

See, I value knowledge very highly and it never hurts you. In fact, it gets you jobs, if you have knowledge. A lot of people aren't willing to take that attitude or take the trouble to learn. It does require effort to learn and if you're too lazy to think, well then you've got to learn.

Tell me what you're doing now.

Clyde Tombaugh: Well I get pressed by the public all the time. Dozens of people are after me all the time for favors. It really takes up a lot of time and I just don't have time to do the things I really want to do. I can ignore some of it, some it I can't. We have a new school a mile south of here called the Clyde W. Tombaugh Elementary School which the people of Las Cruces named in my honor. Every young kid in that school knows I found Pluto and it thrills them to death that they're going to the Tombaugh School. So I'm doing all right in this community. They give me great honor.

Do they ever come and visit you in your backyard?

Clyde Tombaugh: Oh yes. Many times. I've shown a lot of people my telescopes.

Tell me about your backyard.

Clyde Tombaugh: I have the big 16-inch out there, and the nine-inch you see right next to it. I have another telescope on an old lawnmower that wheels around to dodge the lights and trees. I looked at Halley's Comet with that. It's a beautiful ten-inch telescope. I made that also. I've made lots of mirrors.

And you mounted that telescope on an old lawnmower?

[ Video ] Low High

[ Video ] Low High

Clyde Tombaugh: Yes, because I can wheel it around to different parts of the yard. Some of the comets are so low in the sky, I'd have to move it around to dodge the house and trees. I couldn't do that with these other telescopes. So it's my portable telescope. I've taken it with me on trips up in the mountains sometimes, on outings with an RV and so on. I've had lots of fun with it.

Are you looking for anything in particular through those telescopes?

Clyde Tombaugh: No, just playing around, looking at the beautiful star fields and so on.

I have this feeling of wonder what it's like to kind of look there and just sweep around through the Milky Way and say, "Oh there's hundreds and hundreds of stars and star clusters." It gives me a feeling of great elation. It's a therapy for me, just idle, plowing through the sky. It's fun. I wonder about all the wonderful things that must be going on there that we don't see, realizing there are thousands and thousands -- millions -- of alien civilizations out there, doing things, maybe something like we are. This is something you think about.
[ Video ] Low High    [ Audio ] Quicktime	[ Key to Success ] Passion

Clyde Tombaugh Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4