Percival Lowell

Percival Lowell Percival Lowell was born in Boston, Massachusetts on the 13th of March in 1855 to a distinguished, wealthy, well-educated, New England family. His brother Abbott became the President of Harvard University, and his sister Amy became a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and critic. Lowell himself earned a B.A. degree at Harvard with a concentration in mathematics. From his graduation until 1893 he was a businessman, a counselor, and was foreign secretary to the Korean …

…could not be explained by the presence of Neptune. Lowell died on November 12, 1916 in Flagstaff, Arizona. Although he didn’t live to see the discovery of Planet X, the search continued until 1930 when Clyde Tombaugh, at the Lowell Observatory, discovered a 9th planet dubbed Pluto. It seems fitting that Pluto’s astronomical symbol combines P and L, Percival Lowell’s initials. A mausoleum was erected on the campus of Lowell’s Observatory on Mars Hill.