The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet (2 page)

Figure 1.6.
Venetia Burney, an 11-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford, England, first suggested the name Pluto after her well-connected grandfather had read the news story of Lowell Observatory’s discovery of a planet. She had been studying classical mythology, and Pluto, the god of the underworld, was fresh in her mind.

Other suggestions for names included Artemis, Atlas, Constance, Lowell, Minerva, Zeus, and Zymal. But Pluto eventually triumphed. The name also maintains a happy family with Jupiter and Neptune as Pluto’s brothers in Roman mythology.

Apparently, the naming of cosmic objects was already in Venetia’s bloodline. Her great-uncle, Henry Madan, was science master of Eaton College in 1877 when he named the two newly discovered moons of Mars—Phobos (Fear) and Deimos (Terror)—after the battle companions to Ares, the Greek god of war. Venetia Burney ultimately became Venetia Burney Phair and worked as an economics teacher before retiring to her home in Epsom, England.

Lowell Observatory officially proposed the name Pluto on May 1, 1930, in simultaneous letters to the American Astronomical Society, the Royal Astronomical Society, and the
New York Times
. Pluto’s official symbol would be the overlapping, juxtaposed letters P and L, the first two letters of Pluto and, in a happy coincidence, the initials of Percival Lowell, who instigated the search in the first place.

Eleven years later, in 1941, a team of physicists led by Glen T. Seaborg manufactured a new element for the Periodic Table (you may remember this ubiquitous grid of boxes from chemistry class) while working at the University of California at Berkeley’s cyclotron—one of the world’s pre-eminent atom smashers. The new element had 94 protons in its nucleus and was in need of a name. There, in the outer solar system, the newly discovered planet loomed large. Thus was born plutonium. This fissionable element became the active ingredient in the atomic bomb that the U.S. Army Air Force dropped over the Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, just weeks after the bomb had been tested on July 16, 1945, at the Trinity test site in New Mexico—the first-ever detonation of a nuclear weapon. The one dropped over Hiroshima on August 6 was not pretested. It used uranium, whose bomb-worthy fissionable properties had been well established on paper and in the laboratory.

Figure 1.7.
Herbert Hall Turner, Oxford professor and former astronomer royal, promptly cabled the name Pluto to fellow astronomers across the Atlantic at the Lowell Observatory after hearing the suggestion from 11-year-old Venetia Burney, via her grandfather, Falconer Madan, a retired librarian from the Bodleian Library of Oxford University.

In hindsight, plutonium was destined to be named for Pluto. By 1789, just eight years after Herschel discovered Uranus, Martin Klaproth, of Germany, discovered the heaviest atom in nature. In need of a name, and with the planet Uranus fresh on people’s minds, the element uranium would ultimately land at slot 92 on the periodic table, harboring 92 protons in its nucleus.

Before you even discovered the next element in sequence, what would you want to name it? Berkeley physicists Edwin M. McMillan and Philip H. Abelson discovered element number 93 in 1940 and duly named it neptunium after planet Neptune, thus mirroring the sequence of element names to the run of planet names in the outer solar system, leaving plutonium to follow naturally thereafter.

In spite of its later-to-be-determined diminutive size, Pluto, the god of death, is forever enshrined on our periodic table of elements and associated, by name, with the atomic bomb, one of the greatest weapons of destruction ever devised.

The Periodic Table has memorialized other cosmic objects as well. The first two asteroids discovered, Ceres and Pallas, led to cerium and palladium. Earth and Moon are there, too, in the guise of the rare elements tellurium and selenium (from the Latin
Tellus
for Earth and the Greek
Selene
for Moon), found naturally together in ores.

Meanwhile, back in
Los Angeles on September 5, 1930, the fledgling Disney Brothers Studio releases a cartoon titled “The Chain Gang,” featuring two bloodhounds hot on the trail of Mickey Mouse, an escaped convict. These unnamed canines would serve as the model for the character who would become Pluto, Mickey’s pet dog, but not before some further experiments with the concept.

On October 23, 1930, Disney releases “The Picnic,” featuring a bloodhound character, but with the name Rover, who in this cartoon belongs to Minnie Mouse. Both Rover and Minnie join ex-convict Mickey for a picnic. Minnie wants to eat. Rover wants to play. And Mickey, having spent so much time in jail, is horny. But Rover keeps preventing amorous encounters between Mickey and Minnie, angering Mickey. Rover makes amends by using his tail as a windshield wiper when Mickey and Minnie drive home in a rainstorm.

At last, on May 3, 1931, Disney releases “The Mouse Hunt,” in which the playful bloodhound first appears as Pluto, Mickey’s dog. In a press release issued by Mickey Mouse, the rodent recalls Walt Disney suggesting the alliterative Pluto the Pup:

After twenty or so cartoon appearances, Pluto finally stars in his own production. On November 26, 1937, Disney releases “Pluto’s Quin-Puplets,” in which Pluto is left in charge of five puppies as his Pekingese wife, Fifi, goes out for food. The puppies wreak puppy-havoc at home while Pluto gets drunk on moonshine. When Fifi returns, they all get kicked out of the doghouse.

Such are the humble beginnings of a cartoon icon.

While there is
no unambiguous link between Pluto the Disney character and Pluto the planet, the connection has always been assumed.
⁵
We can bet that Walt Disney was not thinking about constipation when he suggested the name for Mickey’s dog; before the release of “Mouse Hunt,” Pluto the planet had already spent a full year wooing the hearts and minds of the American public. Whether or not Walt Disney was thinking about the cosmos when he named his dog is not important here. What matters is that the seeds were sown for planet Pluto to receive a level of attention from the American public that far exceeds its astrophysical significance in the solar system. The
New York Times
science writer Malcolm W. Brown, in a February 9, 1999, article on Pluto, quoted an unnamed astronomer who made a similar observation:

Over the decades to follow, as the size, influence, and wealth of the Walt Disney conglomerate grew, now a $30 billion company, so, too, did the name Pluto in the collective sentiment of Americans. Indeed, the corporation had achieved a kind of control over our Plutonic emotions, leaving me with no choice but to label the Disney empire what it is:

As a scientist at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History, I sustain an osmotic link with colleagues whose expertise draws from the entire animal kingdom. We’ve got herpetologists, paleontologists, entomologists, and mammalogists, to name a few. So while I cannot claim fluency on all subjects of natural history, I do claim sensitivity. This leads me to ask how it came to be that Pluto is Mickey’s dog, but Mickey is not Pluto’s mouse.

Something is awry in the taxonomic class of mammals in the Disney universe.

I would later learn that if you are a Disney character who wears clothes, no matter what your species, you can then own pets, who themselves wear no clothes at all, except perhaps for a collar. Pluto runs around naked except for a collar that says “Pluto.” Mickey runs around with yellow shoes, pants, white gloves, and the occasional bow tie; The haberdasheral hierarchy is clear.

One never knows
fully how and why some words, names, ideas, or objects penetrate culture, while others fade to insignificance. In straw polls that I persistently take of elementary school children, their favorite planet is Pluto, with Earth and Saturn a distant second. At some level of cognition, the simple sound of a word on the ear or an exotic meaning can make or break a word’s popularity and prevalence. Among all planet names, for example, Pluto sounds the most like a punch line to a hilarious joke: “…he thought he was on Pluto!” And while the names of all other planets are traceable to mythical gods whose talents or powers one might envy, Pluto is, of course, named for the god of a dark and dank residence for the dead. That’s just funny.

Figure 1.8.
The cultural juxtaposition of Pluto the dog and Pluto the planet makes irresistible content for cartoonists.
Top:
Cartoonist Bill Day, of the
Commercial Appeal
, parodies America’s ongoing scientific illiteracy.
Bottom:
Pluto, the most misbehaved of all planets, gets sent to the interstellar doghouse in a comic by Dick Locher, of the
Chicago Tribune
.