Percival Lowell

Percival Lowell 1855-1916, American astronomer, b. Boston, grad. Harvard, 1876; brother of Abbott Lawrence Lowell and Amy Lowell. He visited Korea and Japan, where he acted as counselor and foreign secretary to the Korean Special Mission to the United States and wrote several books about East Asia. Becoming interested in astronomy, he established (1894) the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Ariz., and devoted himself to making personal observations. It was his belief that Mars was inhabited and that the striations on the Martian surface were artificial waterways. He also contended that there was a planet beyond Neptune (seemingly confirmed in 1930 by the discovery of Pluto, but Pluto is now regarded as a dwarf planet). From 1902 he was nonresident professor of astronomy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among his many writings on astronomy are Mars and Its Canals (1906) and The Genesis of Planets (1916).

Bibliography: See biography by A. L. Lowell (1935).

Lowell, Percival (1855–1916)Americanastronomer. He established the Lowell Observatory in 1894 to search for signs of intelligent life on Mars, and drew maps depicting a network of Martian canals as originally reported by G. V.Schiaparelli. He calculated the position of an unknown ‘Planet X’ that he believed was the cause of irregularities in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, and began to search for it, unsuccessfully. Pluto was found in 1930 by C. W.Tombaugh at Lowell Observatory, but turned out not to be the large planet that Lowell had predicted.

Lowell, Percival (1855–1916) US astronomer, brother of Amy Lowell. In 1894, he built an observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona. Lowell studied the orbits of Uranus and Neptune and calculated that their orbital irregularities were caused by an undiscovered Planet X. His predictions led to the discovery of Pluto in 1930. He also observed Mars, producing intricate maps of the ‘canals’, which he ascribed to the activities of intelligent beings.