science · 24 November 1972 · 52 years ago
death
Died 24 Nov 1972 at age 78 (born 19 Dec 1893).
Roger Lowell Putnam was a businessman and politician who facilitated the search for Pluto. He pursued a business career in Boston but had an amateur love of astronomy. His uncle, Percival Lowell, had founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he began a quest to find the suspected planet he called “Planet X.” Lowell died in 1916, and left considerable funds in his will for his observatory to continue that work. The search languished while his widow contested the Observatory's trust fund. She lost the case, but the legal costs of the fight halved the fund. Putnam became its trustee in 1927, and he revived the search for Planet X. He organized, and helped fund, a new 13-inch refracting telescope and astrograph for that purpose. It was this instrument Clyde Tombaugh used to make the photographic plates on which he identified the new planet on 13 Mar 1930.
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