When people in the 1920's thought about Mars, they didn't wonder if Martians existed -- they wondered what the Martians were like and what they were up to. Their feelings towards Mars (and our own today) were largely due to a turn-of-the-century aristocrat and amateur astronomer named Percival Lowell.
Lowell was the epitome of New England respectability. His family's presence in North America stemmed back to the Puritan settlers: the first Percival Lowell arrived in the New World when Galileo was still alive. By the early nineteenth century, the Lowell family had amassed one of the great fortunes in the country by founding America's textile industry. When the second Percival was born in 1855, the name Lowell and the word millionaire were synonymous.
But Lowell was far more than a wealthy man. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, his mathematics teacher called him the most gifted student he had ever taught, and James Russell, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, called him "the most brilliant man in Boston."
Lowell spent years as a traveler, diplomat, and successful author, but he never lost his talent for mathematics or his fascination with astronomy. In 1893, he indulged these passions and tapped his personal fortune to build his own observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. This observatory was meant to resolve an ongoing debate among scientists about the possibility of life on Mars. But what Lowell reported from "Mars Hill" would have exactly the opposite effect.
