Percival Lowell’s madness
1896 – 1916
Percival Lowell commissioned the Craft to be built in 1896 and built his observatory on the highest peak in what was then Arizona Territory with the intention of proving the existence of life on Mars. Before he renamed it, the mountain had been known as Hutchinson Peak, but after Lowell bought the place he had the new name officially entered into the territorial legers, and when Arizona became a state in 1913 the name was duly entered into the new books.
Mars Hill, as though you could get there from here.
Mars had seduced Lowell as a young man. In 1877 Giovanni Schiaparelli described a series of long straight formations on the Martian surface, the canali – “channels” was what the word meant in Italian but it had been translated everywhere as canals. Lowell was twenty-two. Though his family was rich and illustrious he had been raised in some innocence, and this – combined with a passionate, speculative nature – allowed him to pore over the etchings in the Century with the hot intensity of a schoolboy. The Martians had built the canals – so the popular consensus went – in order to divert the melting ice masses of the poles to the dry, arable central regions of the planet. The Martians were up there, hard at work, and one day we would go to visit them. Or they would come down to visit us, draped in their Martian cloaks and speaking their ornate Martian language and driving their enormous Martian vessels. At any rate there was activity in the Solar System, there was company, and to a man of Lowell’s sensibilities the idea was intoxicating. The French astronomer Camille Flammarion declared that he pitied anyone who had yet to see Mars through a telescope – qu’une si belle image d’un monde estrange aux celestes raums enormes, les continents, les mers, les petits isles, reste tout inconnu! – what a shame it was not to have gazed up through the air and to have seen there, in shadowy outline, the Martian seas, the islands, the continents, the home planet of an entirely foreign civilization! But the Lowells were rich, and Percival did not have to suffer anyone’s pity.
So it was that Percival Lowell attached himself to the Harvard College Astronomical Union and by dint of his large contributions made his way into the center of things there, and along the way availed himself of a fairly good education. He took a good look at Mars for himself through Harvard’s telescope and decided that the broad shadows on the surface were certainly interesting, though privately he was disappointed. He had expected something less ambiguous. And yet he could picture them so clearly in his mind’s eye: a whole industrious race of beings up there in the sky, like ants in the ceiling. The busyness of them attracted him, the ambition.
They were Americans, he felt.
He persisted in his belief, even after the initial popular interest had died away. He understood that most people thought he was a sort of crackpot. But money shut a lot of mouths, as it always does, and by the time he was in a position to commission the construction of a good planetary telescope, no one was laughing. The Craft was built in Rhode Island for $50,000, which at the time was enough to pay for fifty thousand decent haircuts or a hundred thousand balcony tickets to see Maid of the Sea, which was the great entertainment of the year in Boston, a play about a woman in love with a sailor who proceeds to get herself up as a sea captain and sets off in search of him. Lowell did not see the thing but his sister Amy did; she was two years younger than he and was publishing her eighth volume of poetry, and he was buying mountains in Arizona, and they looked at each other with a kind of wonderment, not entirely fathoming what the other had in mind.
The Craft telescope traveled by train to Flagstaff in 1901, where Vesto Slipher supervised its installation. The observatory itself had been built in nine days from the local timber: a square two-story clapboard building fifty feet on a side, whitewashed aganst the sun, with a knotty interior that smelled strongly of cut pine. The roof was flat and opened by means of a series of gears. When it was hung in its armature the Craft could be pointed straight up or to within five degrees of the horizon. It was a beautiful piece of machinery, giving off a fine odor of brass and machine oil and responding with obliging promptness to every request. For small corrections the operator spun the tiny, dollar-sized wheel mounted near the eyepiece and for larger movements he spun a series of gradually larger gears. When the operator found the object he wanted he engaged the rubber clamps and so started the drive that moved the telescope in synchrony with the night sky.
A single exposure of a starfield could take an hour, and if a meteor flashed too brightly overhead you had to start over – but that was true everywhere.
Lowell spent the first four years in Arizona looking at Mars, taking an endless series of inconclusive photographs, and then in 1905 he began photographing star fields, looking for the ninth planet his math suggested was out there. Two years later he had made more than four hundred photographic plates and examined them thoroughly, but had found nothing. For a while he told no one what he was doing, certain that others were hot on the trail as well. But in fact it was a dreary piece of business – the long exposures, the painstaking examination of the resulting photographs – and no one else wanted anything to do with it. As telescopes got more powerful and the new science of spectography improved, astronomers began to look beyond the Solar System into the galaxy beyond, and to a large extent Lowell was by himself in his search for the ninth planet, which he called, with characteristic melodrama, Planet X. Even he lost interest from time to time. It was so demanding, so headachy, all that staring.
In 1916 Lowell died – he had a stroke while riding the train between Chicago and Boston and he was on ice by the time he arrived. His will provided a million dollars for the continuation of the search for Planet X, the work to be done at Lowell Observatory, but his widow Constance challenged the clause – a million dollars was nothing to sneeze at in 1916, even for a Lowell – and the bequest was held up in probate for years, and the search suspended. Lowell himself was buried in a mausoleum beside the Observatory, a stipulation which Margeline had no interest in challenging. Not until 1927 was the matter settled. The million dollars was released, new equipment was brought in, and the project, like a ship long in drydock, shuddered to life again.
In the eleven years that had passed since Lowell’s death no one had found the ninth planet. But the mathematics had not changed. In fact the improved observations of Neptune now showed without a doubt that something big was out there, tugging at the skirts of the outermost known planet.
They would find it. It was a matter of when.
And, as Alan Alan Barber often thought, it was also a matter of who.