Percival Lowell

Lowell was born into the family that gave Boston its wool mills and its poets — his sister Amy became a major American poet, his brother Abbott a president of Harvard. He graduated from Harvard with distinction in mathematics in 1876 and then, as expected of a Lowell, ran a cotton mill for six years. He broke from that path in his late twenties, traveling repeatedly to Japan and Korea and writing books on their culture and religion that impressed readers as far away as Lafcadio Hearn. In 1893, after reading the French astronomer Camille Flammarion's book on Mars, he abandoned business and travel writing entirely and turned, at 38, to a subject he had no formal training in at all: planetary astronomy.

He built an observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona in 1894, choosing the site for its altitude and clear air rather than its convenience, and spent 15 years there mapping what he insisted were canals on Mars, built by a dying civilization to move water from its polar ice. Most astronomers could not see what he saw and said so — the canals turned out to be an optical illusion, confirmed as such once spacecraft finally reached Mars in the 1960s. His last decade went into a mathematical search for a ninth planet, 'Planet X,' whose gravity he believed was tugging at Neptune and Uranus. He never found it. His observatory did, 14 years after he died.

Lowell photographed Pluto twice, in March and April of 1915, without recognizing the faint point of light for what it was. He also spent years drawing spoke-like lines on the surface of Venus that turned out to be nothing on Venus at all — a later analysis of his telescope concluded that the narrow aperture he preferred had turned the instrument into something close to an ophthalmoscope, and that what he had mapped for a decade was the shadow of the blood vessels in his own eye. He died believing in both the canals and Planet X. His wife Constance then sued the observatory over his will, tying up its funding in court for ten years and delaying the very search he had started.

Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto at Lowell Observatory in 1930, using the telescope Lowell had commissioned and the calculations Lowell's team had produced, and the new planet's symbol became a monogram of P and L — Pluto's initials and Lowell's at once. The Mars canals, discredited within his own lifetime by better telescopes, still shaped a century of American science fiction, from H. G. Wells's Martians to the deserts Ray Bradbury and Edgar Rice Burroughs imagined. Pluto itself was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006, complicating the one discovery that had vindicated him. He is remembered now less as a scientist than as the man who made Americans believe, wrongly, that something intelligent lived across the gap.

Percival Lowell's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Soul of the Far East book
  On Japanese culture and religion 1888
• Lowell Observatory building
  Built at Flagstaff, Arizona, chosen for its altitude and clear air 1894
• Mars and Its Canals book
  His fullest statement of the canal theory 1906
• Mars As the Abode of Life book 1908
• Search for Planet X discovery
  Search begun by Lowell, completed 14 years after his death 1916

• 1876 aged ~21 Graduates from Harvard with distinction in mathematics
• 1883 aged ~28 Serves as foreign secretary to a Korean diplomatic mission
• 1894 aged ~39 Founds Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona
• 1895 aged ~40 Publishes Mars, laying out the canal theory
• 1906 aged ~51 Begins the mathematical search for Planet X
• 1908 aged ~53 Marries Constance Savage Keith
• April 1915 aged 60 His observatory photographs Pluto twice without recognizing it
• November 12, 1916 aged 61 Dies of a stroke at Flagstaff
• February 18, 1930 aged 74 Clyde Tombaugh discovers Pluto at Lowell Observatory

• Carl Sagan 1934–1996
  Astronomer and science communicator who brought cosmology to millions through Cosmos and popular books. succeeded as science popularizer
• Maria Mitchell 1818–1889
  First American woman professional astronomer who discovered a comet and taught at Vassar College. preceded him as an American astronomer
• Edwin Hubble 1889–1953
  Astronomer whose discovery of expanding galaxies provided the foundation for the Big Bang theory. fellow astronomer, different era
• Vera Rubin 1928–2016
  Measured galaxy rotation curves that provided the main observational evidence for dark matter. continued the search for the unseen