The little girl who named Pluto

Every once in a while a science story comes along that absolutely astonishes me. Sometimes it astonishes me because it represents a giant advancement in human knowledge. And sometimes it astonishes me because it represents a giant gap in human knowledge…specifically, mine. Such a story is one I stumbled on this week, concerning Venetia Phair (née Burney), an 87-year-old retired teacher who lives in Epsom, England.

What sets Venetia apart from other 87-year-old schoolteachers is that she’s the only person alive to have named one of the solar system’s nine planets: she came up with the name Pluto for the outermost planet when she was an 11-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford.

In a January interview with Edward Goldstein of NASA Public Affairs, in honor of the then-impending launch of the New Horizons spacecraft, now en route to a 2015 fly-past of Pluto, Venetia explained how it all came about.

“I think it was on March 14, 1930, and I was having breakfast with my mother and my grandfather,” she said. “And my grandfather read out at breakfast the great news (of the discovery of Pluto) and said he wondered what it would be called. And for some reason, I after a short pause, said, ‘Why not call it Pluto?’”

Venetia explained that she was familiar with Greek and Roman legends from various children’s books and also knew the names of the other planets. “I suppose I just thought that this was a name that hadn’t been used. And there it was.”

Of course, lots of children say things over the breakfast table that don’t make it onto a map of the heavens. Most children, however, don’t have as their grandfather Falconer Madan, a retired librarian of Oxford University’s famous Bodleian Library. Madan, impressed by Venetia’s suggestion, dropped by the house of Herbert Hall Turner, a friend of his and a professor of astronomy at Oxford.

Ironically, Turner wasn’t home: he was at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in London where everyone was wondering what the new planet would be called. But fortunately for Venetia, none of them came up with Pluto.

When Turner finally heard the suggestion from Madan, he thought it was an excellent name for the new heavenly body. Turner sent a telegram to the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, where Clyde Tombaugh had discovered the planet. On May 1, 1930, the name Pluto was formally adopted.

The discoverers apparently liked the name not only because it was one of the few notable names from classical mythology that had yet to be used but also because the first two letters were the initials of the late Percival Lowell—after whom the Lowell Observatory was named, and who, along with William Pickering, had predicted the existence of a planet outside Neptune’s orbit, but never saw it.

Madan awarded Venetia a five-pound note. “As a grandfather, he liked to have an excuse for generosity,” Venetia told the BBC. She also made sure the BBC knew that Disney’s cartoon dog named Pluto had nothing to do with her suggestion: “People were repeatedly saying: ‘Ah, she named it after Pluto the dog’. It has now been satisfactorily proven that the dog was named after the planet, rather than the other way round. So, one is vindicated.”

The launch of the New Horizons mission has probably gotten Venetia more publicity than she received 76 years ago. “I think the newspapers were mostly occupied by the exploits of the woman pilot Amy Johnson (the first woman to fly solo from Britain to Australia) at the time,” she told NASA. “My grandfather collected any information there was through a press agency and put it into two scrapbooks that I have, which I treasure.”

In addition to the long-spent five-pound note from her grandfather, Venetia has received a badge from Johns Hopkins University and had an asteroid and a scientific instrument named after her. But she’s never seen the planet she named, although she has visited the Lowell Observatory and saw the telescope through which Tombaugh first saw Pluto.

It’s a great story, isn’t it? But perhaps I can be forgiven for not having heard of it until now.

As Venetia herself told NASA, “On the whole, it doesn’t arise in conversation, and you don’t just go around telling people that you named Pluto.”