The first minor planet was discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801. Although he did not know it at first, Piazzi had been chosen to be one of twelve ‘Celestial Police’ who were given the task of patrolling the skies in order to discover new solar system objects. We now know of hundreds of thousands of minor planets. The largest, Vesta, was discovered with three other minor planets in the first years of the nineteenth century. It soon became obvious that there was not just one object in the blank space in the Titius- Bode law, but dozens in what became called the asteroid belt. For the next hundred years, these objects were discovered at a rate of a dozen or so each year. With the advent of photography in the late nineteenth century hundreds were discovered annually. And more recently, automated telescopes are finding new objects by the thousands each year.