Percival Lowell

Percival Lowell was an American astronomer and businessman who founded Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and became a prominent, controversial advocate of the idea that Mars was home to an intelligent civilization. After learning of Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli's reports of long linear features on Mars that Schiaparelli had cautiously called canali, Italian for channels, Lowell became convinced these were an artificial network of canals built by Martians to carry water from the planet's polar ice caps to a dying, drying civilization at its populated center, and he built his own observatory in 1894 specifically to study the planet in detail. Lowell published his Martian canal theory in several popular books, and although the great majority of professional astronomers remained skeptical and later spacecraft imagery showed no such canal network existed, his work brought enormous public attention to planetary astronomy. Later in his career Lowell turned to a different problem, predicting from small apparent irregularities in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune that a further, undiscovered planet, which he called Planet X, must lie beyond Neptune, and he organized a systematic photographic search for it that continued at his observatory after his death in 1916; that search eventually led Clyde Tombaugh to discover Pluto there in 1930.