He established the Lowell Observatory in 1894 to search for signs of intelligent life on Mars, and drew maps depicting a network of Martian canals as originally reported by G. V. Schiaparelli. He calculated the position of an unknown ‘Planet X’ that he believed was the cause of irregularities in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, and began to search for it, unsuccessfully. Pluto was found in 1930 by C. W. Tombaugh at Lowell Observatory, but turned out not to be the large planet that Lowell had predicted.