The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Lowell, Percival

LOWELL, Percival, American astronomer: b. Boston, 13 March 1855; d. Flagstaff, Ariz., 13 Nov. 1916. He was a brother of Abbott Lawrence Lowell, and was graduated at Harvard in 1876. He went to Japan in 1883 and lived there and in Korea from time to time till 1893. He was counsellor and foreign secretary to Korean Special Mission to the United States in 1894. In 1894 he established the Lowell Observatory; undertook an eclipse expedition to Tripoli in 1900 and in 1907 sent an expedition to photograph the planet Mars. He received the Janssen medal of French Astronomical Society in 1904 for his researches on Mars. In 1908 he received a gold medal from La Sociedad Astronomica de Mexico. He made various discoveries on the planets Mercury, Venus, Saturn and especially Mars. In 1902 he was appointed non-resident professor of astronomy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and many other societies in America and Europe. He published ‘Chosön’ (1885); ‘The Soul of the Far East’ (1886); ‘Noto’ (1891); ‘Occult Japan’ (1894); ‘Mars’ (1895); ‘Annals of the Lowell Observatory’ (Vol. I, 1898; Vol. II, 1900; Vol. III, 1905); ‘The Solar System’ (1903); ‘Mars and Its Canals’ (1906); ‘Mars as the Abode of Life’ (1908); ‘The Evolution of Worlds’ (1909) and various papers to learned societies.