The Girl Who Named Pluto

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Venetia Phair dies at 90

At age 11, the keen student of mythology suggested naming the newly discovered planet after the Roman god of the underworld.


Venetia Phair, who was 11 years old when she suggested Pluto as the name of the newly discovered planet, has died in England. She was 90.

She died at home in Epsom, south of London, on April 30, her family said. The cause of death was not disclosed.

Phair suggested the name to her grandfather at breakfast in 1930.

"My grandfather, as usual, opened the paper, The Times, and in it he read that a new planet had been discovered. He wondered what it should be called. We all wondered," she recalled in a short film, "Naming Pluto," released earlier this year.

"And then I said, 'Why not call it Pluto?' And the whole thing stemmed from that."

Her grandfather was Falconer Madan, the retired librarian of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. He relayed the suggestion to his friend Herbert Hall Turner, professor of astronomy at Oxford, who on that day was at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, where possible names for the planet were being discussed.

Turner then passed on the suggestion to Clyde W. Tombaugh, who made the discovery at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona.

When the name was publicly announced May 1, 1930, Phair said her grandfather rewarded her with a five-pound note.

(The same purchasing power today would be about 230 pounds, or $350.)

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