singer, songwriter, rock 'n' roller
Percival Lowell came from a well-heeled and influential family. There are cities in Massachusetts named for various members of the clan, and his sister was the American poet Amy Lowell. Percival was an amateur astronomer. He is best known today for being the leading and most eloquent believer in the canals of Mars. Fascinated with the idea, he'd searched the world for a locale with crystalline clear skies, and there he would build his observatory. He eventually decided on Mars Hill in Flagstaff, Arizona; and by the year 1900 he'd installed there a 24-inch refractor.
It is said that he saw more than perhaps he saw. While he assumed Mars was a desert-like planet, it was an Earth-like desert -- not unlike the landscape he saw around him in Arizona -- and it was teeming with life. His notebooks of the time are filled with sketches from his observations and show a Martian disc with an extraordinary grid of canals. He mused on the race of intelligent beings that had created this world, and even showed the locations of Martian cities on his maps. The geographical features of the planet are given fanciful names that have endured to this day: Syrtis Major, Elysium, Mons Olympus, Utopia, and Noctus Labyrinthus -- the Labyrinth of Night.
He passionately defended his vision of Mars even when the evidence was mounting against him. Bigger and better telescopes showed no sign of the enigmatic canals, and civil engineers jeered at the idea of canals carrying water across a planet-wide desert. The scientific community largely moved away from Lowell's dream world. Eventually he was left alone with his cortege of starry-eyed dreamers. And there he died, deep in his dreams, his rapturous dreams of the wildflowers of Mars.