Percival Lowell

Born in Boston in 1855 into the prominent Lowell family, Percival Lowell was educated at Harvard and first made his mark as a traveler and writer. His early books grew out of long stays in East Asia, where he wrote about Japan and Korea for a broad English-speaking audience.

In the 1890s, he shifted his attention to astronomy and built Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. From there he carried out influential observations of Mars, arguing that the planet showed a network of canals created by intelligent life. That idea was later rejected, but it made him one of the most famous popular astronomers of his era.

Lowell also wrote extensively about the solar system and pushed the search for a distant, unseen planet beyond Neptune. He died in 1916, but the observatory he founded continued that work, and Pluto was discovered there in 1930.