Percival Lowell, 1855-1916: His Work Led to Pluto Discovery

10 July 2010

VOICE ONE:

I'm Mary Tillotson.

VOICE TWO:

And I'm Bob Doughty with the VOA Special English program PEOPLE IN AMERICA. Today, we tell about Percival Lowell whose work led to the discovery of Pluto. His efforts and imagination helped change the history of astronomy in America.

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VOICE ONE:

Percival Lowell came from a New England family with a long history in America. The Lowell family first came to the colony of Massachussetts in sixteen thirty-nine. One of Percival Lowell's ancestors, John Cabot Lowell, manufactured cloth. He became an important American industrialist in the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries.

Percival's father, Augustus Lowell, worked in the family cloth business. He settled his family in Boston, Massachusetts. Percival was born there in eighteen fifty-five. He had a younger brother, Abbott Lawrence, and a younger sister, Amy.

VOICE TWO:

Percival Lowell attended American and European private schools as a young man. He studied mathematics at Harvard University. After he finished his studies at Harvard in eighteen seventy-six, he traveled in Europe and the Middle East for a year. Then he worked as a financial officer in the cloth business of his grandfather.

After several years, Percival realized he was not happy as a businessman. So he decided to travel to Japan to study its culture and language. While there, he was asked to go with a special trade group from Korea to establish trade relations with the United States.