Lowell, Percival, 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

(born March 13, 1855, Boston, Mass., U.S.—died Nov. 12, 1916, Flagstaff, Ariz.) U.S. astronomer. He was born into a distinguished Boston family. In the 1890s he built a private observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., to study Mars. He championed the now-abandoned theory that intelligent inhabitants of a dying Mars had constructed a planetwide system of irrigation. He thought that the so-called canals of Mars (see Mars, canals of) were bands of cultivated vegetation dependent on this irrigation. Lowell's theory, long vigorously opposed, was finally put to rest by images received from the U.S. Mariner spacecraft. His prediction of a planet beyond Neptune and his organization of a search for it contributed to the discovery of Pluto in 1930.

Lowell, Percival (1855–1916) astronomer; born in Boston, Mass. (brother of Abbott and Amy Lowell). Born to wealth, he prospered in business, then spent the years 1883–93 in Asia, which he wrote about in such books as Soul of the Far East (1888). By the early 1890s he was concentrating on astronomy, and he used his personal fortune to build and staff an observatory (now the Lowell) in Flagstaff, Ariz. From 1894 on, he directed important research there, but he became most famous for predictions: the existence of another planet, confirmed by the discovery of Pluto in 1930; and the existence of intelligent life on Mars, nullified by space probes.