Clyde William Tombaugh was born near Reading, south of Streator, in 1906. He attended Heenanville Grade School and Streator High School and became interested in astronomy at an early age. In 1922 his family moved to Kansas. He built telescopes and at age twenty-three began work at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. In 1930, after a lengthy study of reckonings by Percival Lowell, Tombaugh discovered the ninth planet in our solar system, which he named Pluto.