The TOtable Tornado Observatory (nicknamed "TOTO" after the dog in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, in which a tornado is a key plot element) is a large, instrumented barrel-shaped device invented in 1979 by engineers Dr. Al Bedard and Carl Ramzy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Environmental Technology Laboratory (ETL), and Dr. Howard Bluestein, meteorologist at the University of Oklahoma (OU). NOAA's objective was to place the TOTO directly in the path of a tornado, where it could, theoretically, record valuable information about the tornado's structure.