ALL WHO WANDER

Plug On, Percival: An Off-kilter Genius Right for All the Wrong Reasons

PERCIVAL LOWELL IS MY HERO-for all the wrong reasons.

Of course, maybe this just reflects a lamentably snivelly need to sprinkle water on the clay feet of people much smarter than I.

But I think it's because Lowell is my kind of genius -just like good old Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan, a legendary pilot remembered now mostly because in 1938 he misread a compass and mistakenly flew from New York to Ireland, instead of to California.

Either way, you have to admit that Lowell is now mostly known for his biggest blunders.

So I thought I'd honor the patron saint of confused genius on the year that marks the 75th anniversary of his Flagstaff observatory's discovery of Pluto. Granted, Arizona Highways is 80, Pluto's only 75. But I can afford to be generous. Moreover, this happenstance gives me the opportunity to add one off-kilter tidbit to our summer travel guide to the high country, awaiting you in the lush green grace of our cover package.

Lowell, a Boston mathematician, built the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff in 1894 in the clear, still air at 7,260 feet. Then he turned his big hunk of glass and semiobsessive, everincisive intellect to a 23-year study of the Red Planet. Squinting through his 24-inch refracting telescope and discounting the dance of the atmosphere, Lowell discerned a spidery network of canals on Mars. He concluded Martians must have built the canals to bring water from the poles to save a dying civilization. He noted the ephemeral Martian ice caps and speculated that the nonexistent network of canals brought water from the poles to the arid equator-as the Central Arizona Project canal runs the musical fountains of the Biltmore with water from the Rocky Mountains.Alas. Lowell should have rubbed his eyes harder. The Martian canals proved some kind of optical illusion, first referenced by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877. Lowell wrote several books, including Mars and its Canals (1906) and Mars as the Abode of Life (1908). His theories generated sensational headlines and even inspired H.G. Wells to write War of the Worlds, but his first comet of astronomical fame in the end turned into a ball of swamp gas.

Having populated a planet with imaginary Martians, Lowell set his heart on finding an imaginary planet.Flush with the illusory success of his canal theories, Lowell set out to find Planet X, the solar system's ninth planet. Other astronomers had invoked the gravity of the unseen Planet X to explain an odd wiggle in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. So after a heroic trek through the wilderness of precomputer astronomy, Lowell used that wiggle to calculate the position of the mystery planet.

Inspired and brilliant, Lowell and his assistants searched for Planet X from 1905 to 1915. They discovered asteroids, variable stars and evidence of the expanding universe. But as for Planet X...

Zero. Zip. Zilch.

Daunted only by death in 1916, Lowell left behind his observatory and a cadre of devoted astronomers.

Time passed.

Mars spun.

Planet X lurked.

Then in 1929, Clyde W. Tombaugh joined the Lowell Observatory staff and used a new telescope to take deepsky photographs and a new method to compare them. He flickered back and forth between images of the same patch of sky taken a few nights apart, looking for the tiny shift in one of a thousand pinpoints of light that would reveal the existence of an orbiting planet.

You can go to Flagstaff and see for yourself as Tombaugh's images flick back and forth on the fascinating tour of the observatory. I have gone bug-eyed bleary studying the flip-flop-flip-flop of that single fateful sequence, and I can't see the speck unless someone points to it with arrows.

But in 1930, Tombaugh spotted tiny, erratic Pluto near where Lowell had predicted.

The staff announced Tombaugh's historic discovery on what would have been Lowell's 75th birthday.

Way to go, Percival!

One little problem.

His pencil and paper math couldn't actually pinpoint the location of Planet X.

So he ended up looking in the right place for the wrong reasons. And the probably nonexistent Planet X remains on the missing planets list.

Now, that's my kind of genius. Brilliant, daring and imaginative, he triumphed by discovering both canals that never existed and the wrong planet. I have taken him to my bruised heart, a comet of good omen.

So I need not fret when I misplace the magazine's humor page, pick the wrong photo, bury the lead, print the reflected sky upside down or set out for Casa Grande and wind up in Pueblo Grande. Instead, I shall take counsel from Percival Lowell.

And glory in my goofs.