Rivals of Mars

Somewhat surprisingly, Percival Lowell and E.E. Barnard already met in December 1892, before Lowell set sail for Yokohama Bay on what would be his last visit to Japan. The evidence for this is recent. In the 1980s, the Nautical Almanac Office of the U.S. Naval Observatory disposed of its collection of volumes of the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac that were duplicates of those in the USNO Library. Scores of old volumes went into the recycle bins. Richard E. Schmidt, at the time employed as a civil service astronomer at the Observatory, managed to salvage a few. Cleaning out his office on his retirement in September 2015, he found one that had belonged to Barnard, as noted by the inscription (with date 1891) on the first page. How the volume had managed to find its way to Washington, D.C., in the first place was uncertain, but in salvaging it Schmidt had appreciated it was likely to be of considerable value, not least because Barnard had clearly had this particular volume at his side in the dome of the 36-inch refractor of Lick Observatory when he made his celebrated discovery of the fifth satellite of Jupiter in September 1892—the discovery which made him internationally famous. Schmidt generously passed the volume along to me. In addition to Barnard’s inscription and a few notes including some he had entered on the night of the great discovery, the volume was found to contain something entirely unexpected: on the second page, after the one bearing Barnard’s inscription and just before the title page, Percival Lowell had signed his name, in pencil, and set down a forwarding address in Tokyo above the address of his State Street office: Clearly, Lowell anticipated or at least hoped for further correspondence with the discoverer of the fifth satellite of Jupiter, and given the provenance of this entry, can only have entered it in person. Thus, for the first time Barnard’s and Lowell’s hitherto “parallel lives” had intersected, and they had taken each other’s measure. It was only the beginning.