Book Review: When the Red Planet Drove Earthlings to Distraction

There’s something about Mars that tugs at the imagination. More than dazzling Venus, the brightest object in the night sky after the moon, and more than Saturn with its mesmerizing rings, the red planet beckons as something like a parallel version of our own world — similar enough to our home planet that we might fantasize about going there, different enough to make it more exotic than even our remotest deserts or ice-covered polar regions. As journalist David Baron puts it in his engrossing new book, “The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America,” Mars seems to transcend “all other astronomical bodies; it possesses an undeniable aura of mystery and romance, an allure not fully explained by its physical reality.”

Thus far, while some hints of past life on Mars have intrigued scientists, no conclusive evidence for present-day life on Mars has been found. At the turn of the 20th century, however, the issue of what or who might be found on Mars was very much an open question. Was there life, perhaps even intelligent life, on this neighboring world?

Championing the “yes” side of this question was the American astronomer Percival Lowell, the character at the heart of Baron’s story. Born in Boston to a wealthy family, Lowell took an interest in science and by his late 30s had become enamored with Mars. In 1894, he founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, on a raised bit of land that came to be called Mars Hill.

Visitors can still see the telescope that Lowell himself used to gaze at Mars — the 32-foot-long Clark Refractor, with its hefty 24-inch primary lens. Baron, following in Lowell’s footsteps, looked at Mars from the observatory that now bears Lowell’s name. “The planet throbbed and trembled — blurring, then jiggling, then occasionally holding still and coming into focus for a tantalizing instant.”

Baron did not see anything to suggest Mars was inhabited, but Lowell did. Or at least he thought he did: The subtle distinction between what Lowell “really” saw, and what he imagined he saw, is a theme that runs through much of the book. What seems certain is that Lowell had no intention to deceive; he really believed he was seeing what he told the newspapers he saw, including his famous canals. He lectured on Mars and published books on it, and was widely quoted in the popular press. At one time or another, both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal were on board.

The idea that there’s something noteworthy about the Martian surface pre-dates Lowell. The planet is easiest to observe when it’s at its closest approach to Earth, known as opposition, which happens roughly every 780 days (about two years and two months). The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, observing from Milan during the opposition of 1877, saw markings on Mars that he interpreted as oceans and continents. He also observed linear features that he called “canali,” an Italian word meaning channels; some English reports of his work mistranslated this as canals, and the name stuck.

Lowell, observing from Flagstaff, believed he was seeing even more: His drawings depicted elaborate networks of canals that criss-crossed the Martian surface. Perhaps, he reasoned, these were intentionally constructed by intelligent beings. He soon developed a theory to explain these features: Mars is drying up, and its inhabitants are desperately trying to transport water from the polar ice caps to the equatorial regions. “I have no doubt that there is life and intelligence on Mars,” he noted in 1896.

The previous year, Lowell delivered a series of lectures at MIT, arguing forcefully for a sophisticated but desperate civilization on Mars. Baron says he could imagine being swayed, had he been there: “Lowell made his case with such casual confidence and seeming logic that, had I been in that MIT auditorium in 1895, I can imagine myself being swept along.”

Photography, by this time, was a decades-old technology — but attaching a telescope to a camera and capturing images of a distant planet is no mean feat, for a variety of reasons (among them, the Earth’s own atmosphere renders the view, at best, as somewhat blurry). Eventually, though, a number of astronomers, including Lowell, produced half-decent photographs of Mars, which did nothing to settle the canal controversy. Lowell was sure that his photos, taken at Flagstaff, supported his theory; some other astronomers agreed, while others said they saw no canals in the photos whatsoever.

Among the doubters was Edward Walter Maunder, a British astronomer. Maunder devised an ingenious experiment: He asked schoolboys in London to try to copy a drawing that he had hung up at the front of the classroom. The drawing showed various nondescript blotches on a circular disc, reminiscent of what a planet might look like in a telescope eyepiece. The further one sat from the front of the room, the smaller the original appeared, so copying it was difficult. Maunder found that many of the boys’ drawings included straight lines, even though no such linear features were on the original. But this dose of psychology did not end Mars mania; the canalists (as Baron calls them) remained confident.

And Lowell was not alone: The husband-and-wife team of Amherst College astronomer David Todd and author and editor Mabel Todd were on board. With funding from Lowell, they transported the weighty Amherst refracting telescope to the Atacama Desert in Chile, to observe Mars from a site renowned for its clear skies. Their observations seemed to confirm Lowell’s canals, and even the presence of the “double canals” — distinctive pairs of parallel lines — that Lowell had claimed to see.

The author H.G. Wells, meanwhile, shared Lowell’s passion for Mars, and that enthusiasm would be on full display in his story “The War of the Worlds,” first serialized in 1897. Baron’s meticulous research indicates that Wells and Lowell met in Boston in 1906.

And the inventor Nikola Tesla was even more pro-Martian than Lowell. He even said he had received radio signals from the planet — a claim that even Lowell was skeptical of.

Slowly but surely, the case for canals, and Martians, began to evaporate. Astronomers taking photographs using the new reflecting telescope at Mount Wilson, in California, with its 60-inch mirror, found no linear features of the sort Lowell claimed to have seen. The French astronomer Camille Flammarion, who had been an early supporter of the canals theory, began to have doubts about some of Lowell’s ideas. Schiaparelli, who could be said to have ignited Mars mania in the first place, eventually jumped ship. And some astronomers felt Lowell was going too far when he said that not only Mars but Venus — as far as anyone could tell, a featureless, cloud-covered little ball — also had canals.

So what was going on? Were the Martian canals the equivalent of Snuffleupagus, a character on “Sesame Street” who (at least initially) was visible only to Big Bird? As Baron tells it, Lowell’s visions were a classic case of what we now call confirmation bias — roughly, seeing what you want to see. He draws a comparison to King Arthur, a legend that was very popular in 19th-century England: “The legend of King Arthur endured in the popular imagination not because wizards, magical swords, and a place called Camelot really existed but because the Victorian public wanted them to exist.”

Another factor contributing to Martian canals becoming the talk of the town may have been that, for the first time, America was subject to a kind of unifying “popular culture,” creating a level of social cohesion that hadn’t existed previously. As Baron notes, Americans were now largely buying the same brands, consuming the same entertainment, and reading similar newspapers. (And some of those newspapers were more than ready to print whatever extravagant claims about planets and aliens might come their way.)

This past spring, Mars, having reached opposition in January, was prominently visible in the evening sky. As of early September, it is sinking lower and lower in the western sky, and will soon disappear into the sun’s glare. But it will be back, and in early 2027, it will once again shine brilliantly in our skies. And while many of us, especially within brightly lit cities, may hardly give the little red speck a second thought, there will always be those for whom it holds a special attraction, as it did for so many at the turn of the 20th century.

And who knows, we may actually go there. As Baron argues, the excitement that Lowell helped to generate eventually paved the way for robotic exploration of the planet, and may eventually lead us to take our first steps there. “His ideas about Mars, although they had moved from reality to myth, infected one generation after another,” he writes, “until they eventually pushed us into space to learn the truth about our neighboring world.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

Previously Published on undark.org

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