Today in History, February 18th
On February 18, 1930, Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto. Plus Huckleberry Finn's U.S. debut, the White Rose arrests and Toni Morrison's birth.
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February 18 is best known for 1930, when Clyde Tombaugh, a self-taught astronomer at Lowell Observatory, spotted Pluto on a pair of photographic plates. The date also saw the U.S. publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885 and the birth of novelist Toni Morrison in 1931.
The big story: Clyde Tombaugh Finds Pluto (1930)
Percival Lowell spent years hunting for a ninth planet he believed was tugging on Uranus and Neptune. He died without finding it, and the job eventually fell to Clyde Tombaugh, a self-taught amateur who had learned astronomy with a mail-order telescope from the Sears catalog. At Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, Tombaugh photographed patches of sky at night and spent his days comparing the plates in a blink comparator, a device that flips quickly between two images so that anything that moved seems to jump. On February 18, 1930, while checking plates taken on January 23 and 29, he found a faint dot that had shifted. The observatory announced the find on March 13. An 11-year-old English girl, Venetia Burney, suggested the name Pluto, after the Roman god of the underworld. Pluto counted as the ninth planet for 76 years, until the International Astronomical Union reclassified it in August 2006.
More events on February 18
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1546 | Martin Luther, whose protests launched the Protestant Reformation, died in his hometown of Eisleben in Saxony. |
| 1861 | Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as provisional president of the Confederate States of America. |
| 1885 | Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in the U.S. Within weeks a library in Concord, Massachusetts, had banned it. |
| 1929 | The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced its first award winners, with Wings as best picture. The ceremony itself came in May. |
| 1943 | The Gestapo arrested Hans and Sophie Scholl of the White Rose resistance group after they scattered anti-Nazi leaflets at the University of Munich. |
| 1959 | Ray Charles recorded “What’d I Say” at Atlantic Records in New York, a song he had made up on the spot at a dance when his band ran out of material. |
| 2001 | NASCAR star Dale Earnhardt Sr. was killed in a last-lap crash at the Daytona 500. His death led to tougher safety rules. |
| 2003 | An arsonist set fire to a subway train in Daegu, South Korea, killing 198 people. |
| 2006 | Speed skater Shani Davis won the 1,000 meters in Turin, Italy, becoming the first Black athlete to win an individual Winter Olympic gold medal. |
Born on February 18
- 1848: Louis Comfort Tiffany, designer famous for his stained glass and lamps.
- 1931: Toni Morrison, novelist of Beloved and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
- 1933: Yoko Ono, Japanese-born avant-garde artist and musician.
- 1965: Dr. Dre, rapper and producer who helped define West Coast hip-hop.
Sources
- Pluto discovered, History.com
- Tombaugh Discovers Pluto, EBSCO Research Starters
- Finding Pluto with the Blink Comparator, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
- Martin Luther, Britannica
- Jefferson Davis, Britannica
- This Day in History: February 18, History.com
- Louis Comfort Tiffany, Britannica
- Toni Morrison, Britannica
- Yoko Ono, Britannica
- Dr. Dre, Britannica
