Percival Lowell

Percival Lowell (; March 13, 1855 – November 12, 1916) was an American businessman, author, mathematician, and astronomer who fueled speculation that there were canals on Mars, and furthered theories of a ninth planet within the Solar System. He founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and formed the beginning of the effort that led to the discovery of Pluto 14 years after his death.

Percival Lowell was born on March 13, 1855, in Boston, Massachusetts, the first son of Augustus Lowell and Katherine Bigelow Lowell. A member of the Brahmin Lowell family, his siblings included the poet Amy Lowell, the educator and legal scholar Abbott Lawrence Lowell, and Elizabeth Lowell Putnam, an early activist for prenatal care. They were the great-grandchildren of John Lowell and, on their mother's side, the grandchildren of Abbott Lawrence.

Percival graduated from the Noble and Greenough School in 1872 and Harvard College in 1876 with distinction in mathematics. While at Harvard he joined Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. At his college graduation, he gave a speech, considered very advanced for its time, on the nebular hypothesis. He was later awarded honorary degrees from Amherst College and Clark University. After graduation he ran a cotton mill for six years.

In the 1880s, Lowell traveled extensively in the Far East. In August 1883, he served as a foreign secretary and counselor for a special Korean diplomatic mission to the United States. He then went to Korea and lived there from December 1883 to March 1884. In 1884, he took the earliest surviving photograph of a Korean monarch: King Gojong. He also spent significant periods of time in Japan, writing books on Japanese religion, psychology, and behavior. His texts are filled with observations and academic discussions of various aspects of Japanese life, including language, religious practices, economics, travel in Japan, and the development of personality.

Books by Lowell on the Orient include Noto: An Unexplored Corner of Japan (1891) and Occult Japan, or the Way of the Gods (1894), the latter from his third and final trip to the region. His time in Korea inspired Chosön: The Land of the Morning Calm (1886, Boston). The most popular of Lowell's books on the Orient, The Soul of the Far East (1888), contains an early synthesis of some of his ideas that, in essence, postulated that human progress is a function of the qualities of individuality and imagination. The writer Lafcadio Hearn called it a "colossal, splendid, godlike book." At his death he left with his assistant Wrexie Leonard an unpublished manuscript of a book entitled Peaks and Plateaux in the Effect on Tree Life.

After his death, Lowell's wife, Constance, contested his will granting most of his estate to the observatory, halting its work for ten years.

Although Lowell's theories of the Martian canals, of surface features on Venus, and of Planet X are now discredited, his practice of building observatories at the position where they would best function has been adopted as a principle. He also established the program and setting which made the discovery of Pluto by Clyde Tombaugh possible. Lowell has been described by other planetary scientists as "the most influential popularizer of planetary science in America before Carl Sagan".

While eventually disproved, Lowell's vision of the Martian canals as an artifact of an ancient civilization making a desperate last effort to survive, significantly influenced the development of science fiction – starting with H. G. Wells's influential 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, which made the further logical inference that creatures from a dying planet might seek to invade Earth.

The image of the dying Mars and its ancient culture was retained, in numerous versions and variations, in most science fiction works depicting Mars in the first half of the twentieth century (see Mars in fiction). Even when proven to be factually mistaken, the vision of Mars derived from his theories remains enshrined in works that remain in print and widely read as classics of science fiction.

Lowell's influence on science fiction remains strong. The canals figure prominently in Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein (1949) and The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (1950). The canals, and even Lowell's mausoleum, heavily influence The Gods of Mars (1918) by Edgar Rice Burroughs as well as all other books in the Barsoom series.

Asteroid 1886 Lowell, discovered by Henry Giclas and Robert Schaldach in 1949, as well as the crater Lowell on the Moon and the crater Lowell on Mars, were named after him. The Lowell Regio on Pluto was also named in his honor after its discovery by the New Horizons spacecraft in 2015.

Noto: An Unexplored Corner of Japan (1891)

Occult Japan, or the Way of the Gods (1894)

Collected Writings on Japan and Asia, including Letters to Amy Lowell and Lafcadio Hearn, 5 vols., Tokyo: Edition Synapse. ISBN 978-4-901481-48-9

Chosön: The Land of the Morning Calm; a Sketch of Korea. Ticknor. 1886.

The Evolution of Worlds (1910) (Full text at The Evolution of Worlds.)