Percival Lowell and the Canals of Mars

Mars Hill sits at the western edge of Flagstaff, a modest volcanic rise overlooking the city. In eighteen ninety-four, a Boston Brahmin named Percival Lowell climbed it with a telescope and a theory, and transformed what had been a remote railroad town into one of the most consequential sites in the history of astronomy.

Lowell came from old New England money. He had graduated from Harvard in eighteen seventy-six with distinction in mathematics, run a cotton mill, and spent years traveling the Far East before astronomy consumed him. What consumed him specifically was Mars. An Italian astronomer named Giovanni Schiaparelli had reported seeing linear features on the Martian surface and called them canali, a word meaning channels. Lowell read this as evidence of artificial waterways built by a dying civilization, a world so parched that its engineers had constructed a planetary irrigation system to carry water from the polar ice caps to the equatorial deserts.

Lowell chose Flagstaff deliberately: the elevation above seven thousand feet, the clear desert air, and the railroad connection for supplies. It was, as historians note, the first time an observatory had been deliberately located in a remote high-altitude location for optimal seeing conditions, a practice every modern observatory now follows.

He spent fifteen years studying Mars, published three books, and was largely dismissed by the professional astronomical community. Modern space missions proved the canals were optical illusions. But Lowell also set in motion a search for a ninth planet, what he called Planet X. He died in nineteen sixteen without finding it. Fourteen years later, a twenty-four-year-old Kansas farm kid sitting at the same observatory's eyepiece would find it for him.