Percival Lowell

Percival Lowell (1855–1916) was an American businessman, author and astronomer from a prominent Boston family. After traveling and writing about Japan and Korea, he founded the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1894, chiefly to study Mars. In books such as Mars, Mars and Its Canals and Mars as the Abode of Life, he argued that the lines seen on the planet were canals built by intelligent beings, a theory that captured the public imagination but was later disproved. His search for a planet beyond Neptune led, after his death, to the discovery of Pluto at his observatory in 1930.