February 18 Birthday
On February 18, 1930, Clyde Tombaugh, a twenty-four-year-old farm boy from Kansas, discovered Pluto. He had been hired by the Lowell Observatory as a junior astronomer to search for "Planet X," a hypothetical planet beyond Neptune whose existence had been predicted by Percival Lowell based on irregularities in Neptune's orbit. Tombaugh used a blink comparator — a device that alternated between two photographic plates of the same region of sky taken on different nights. A moving object would appear to jump. He examined millions of star images over fourteen months before finding Pluto. The name was suggested by an eleven-year-old girl in Oxford, England. Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006, which Tombaugh did not live to see. The New Horizons spacecraft flew past Pluto in 2015, revealing it to be a complex world with nitrogen glaciers and a nitrogen atmosphere. Mark Twain published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn on February 18, 1885, in the United States. (It had been published in England the previous year.) The book had been delayed because an engraver defaced an illustration, requiring 30,000 copies to be reprinted. Ernest Hemingway said, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." The novel has been banned from libraries since its publication — initially for being "coarse" and "trashy," more recently for its use of racial slurs and its depiction of Jim, the runaway slave. Twain's irony is often missed by both critics and admirers. Huck's decision to help Jim escape, even though he believes it will damn his own soul, is one of the great moral moments in American literature. In 2001, Dale Earnhardt died instantly when his car hit the wall at the Daytona 500 on the final lap. He was forty-nine. He had won seven NASCAR championships, tied for the most ever. His death prompted NASCAR to mandate the HANS device (Head and Neck Support), which prevents the fatal basilar skull fractures that had killed several drivers. Earnhardt had refused to wear it. His son, Dale Earnhardt Jr., was also racing that day and finished second. The race was won by Michael Waltrip, Earnhardt's teammate, who did not learn of Earnhardt's death until after the victory celebration had begun. Toni Morrison, born this day in 1931, was the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. She wrote Beloved (1987), which won the Pulitzer Prize and was inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who killed her own child rather than see her returned to slavery. Morrison was an editor at Random House before she was a famous author, and she published works by Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Muhammad Ali. She said, "If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.". People born on February 18 fall under the zodiac sign of Aquarius. The birthstone is Amethyst and the birth flower is Violet. Historical events on February 18 include 1885: Mark Twain publishes Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the United States, 1930: Clyde Tombaugh discovers Pluto, 2001: Dale Earnhardt dies in crash at Daytona 500. Famous people born on February 18 include Toni Morrison (1931), John Travolta (1954), Cybill Shepherd (1950).