Percival Lowell Biography

Percival Lowell was born on March 13, 1855 into a wealthy, successful, aristocratic family in Boston.  He attended Harvard University and graduated in 1876 with a B.A. and mainly focused on mathematics.  Lowell spent a year in Europe travelling after graduation and subsequently became involved with his grandfather's cotton business, eventually travelling to Japan in 1883 to study the culture and customs.  While staying in Japan, Lowell was invited to serve as the foreign secretary and general counsellor to the first diplomatic mission from Korea to the United States and accepted.  Lowell remained in Korea for a few months after his mission as a guest of the Korean government and also published several books detailing his experiences in Korea, such as Chosön—the Land of the Morning Calm—A Sketch of Korea (1885). 

However, Lowell became increasingly more interested in Astronomy as he travelled through Asia and he took a telescope with him to Japan on his final trip there to make observations.  Due to a particularly convenient orientation of an opposition to the planet Mars in 1894, Lowell decided to focus his studies on Mars.  Lowell had extensive new research that was readily accessible to him since Giovanni Sehiaparelli had extensively studied the planet Mars at another opposition in 1877, during which Sehiaparelli  had discovered canals on the surface of Mars and opened up new opportunities for research.  As Giovanni Sehiaparelli started to lose his eyesight, Percival Lowell decided he must continue his work and expand upon it.  In 1894 after testing several potential observation sites, he settled on Flagstaff, Arizona after a suggestion by W. H. Pickering  that the air there is the steadiest in the United States, as the location for his new observatory that included a 18 inch and a 12 inch telescope.  Lowell had developed a theory that Martians were using the canals to channel water to one another as a artificial irrigation system. 

Lowell became involved in finding a ninth planet, labelled "Planet X".  He predicted its existence mathematically by calculating Uranus' eccentricities that Neptune did not account for.  Lowell kept his research secret for a while in order to ensure that no one would steal his information and claim the credit, but by 1908 his project became public.  With the help of Elizabeth Williams, Lowell increased his efforts and made numerous calculations as well as upgrading to a 40 inch reflecting telescope.  Lowell became very disappointed as no planet was officially discovered and the Academy of Arts and Sciences refused to publish his findings and theories on the existence of "Planet X".  Interestingly, this ninth planet (or Pluto) which coincidentally is no longer considered a planet, did show up on Lowell's plate findings but was fainter than expected and therefore was not noticed.  Lowell died in 1916 of a stroke in his observatory in bitter agitation at not finding this planet X.  Lowell's will included a million dollars to be used in the discovery of the ninth planet, which Clyde Tombaugh succesfully found in 1930.