A planet was found in Arizona by a 24 year old from Kansas who had built his telescope out of a cream separator and his dad’s old Buick. Clyde Tombaugh grew up on farms in Illinois and then Kansas. He ordered a small telescope out of the Sears Roebuck catalog as a teenager, found it was not good enough for looking at planets, and decided to build a better one himself. He ground the mirrors by hand. The parts came off the farm. Tractor pieces, a cream separator, the crankshaft out of his father’s old Buick. In 1928 he used it to make careful drawings of Mars and Jupiter. That same year a hailstorm destroyed the family’s crops and there was no money to send him to college. So he mailed his drawings to Vesto Slipher, the director of Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, hoping somebody there would look at them and tell him what he was doing wrong. They sent back a job offer. The timing was almost absurd. Percival Lowell had spent the last decade of his life hunting a ninth planet he was ...