“Imagination is the soul of science,” astronomer Percival Lowell once remarked. Though largely forgotten today, Lowell possessed an imagination so keen that he helped convince many Americans that the planet Mars was home to an advanced civilization. Science journalist David Baron tells the captivating tale in his terrific new book, “The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.”
Lowell was a wealthy Boston Brahmin, part of the family that founded the Massachusetts manufacturing town that carried its name. He was an amateur in the newly professionalized field of astronomy, but he had enough money to buy himself some influence. Having “grown bewitched by Mars,” in the author’s words, Lowell funded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, which was constructed in 1894 and still stands.
Lowell’s fascination with the Red Planet traced back to the work of Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who, during the late 19th century, observed mysterious lines on Mars. Viewed through a telescope, they resembled stretches of water. Schiaparelli called them “canali,” meaning “channels,” but when his research made its way to England, the press mistranslated the word as “canals.”
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Why We Wrote This
Today’s scientists owe a debt to the imagination and speculation that drove the “Mars craze” in the late 1800s and early 1900s. One astronomer in particular was convinced that superior beings inhabited the arid planet. Newspapers picked up his outlandish theories and added their own. His peculiar ideas drove researchers to uncover the truth.
Baron notes the role of America’s yellow press in sensationalizing stories about the so-called canals discovered on Mars. But Lowell played a big role himself: Observing the lines on Mars, he became convinced that they were signs of a sophisticated irrigation system, which, he concluded, had been designed by an intelligent life form in order to survive on the arid planet. Baron writes, “What Lowell claimed to see on Mars was evidence of an ancient and superior culture, one higher on the ladder of civilization than any on Earth.”
Lowell authored three books and delivered many well-publicized speeches arguing that the canals were proof of life on Mars. Before long, his ideas, though treated with skepticism and even contempt by serious astronomers, made their way into the mainstream. “The Martians” reproduces a New York Times headline announcing, “There Is Life on the Planet Mars.” Inventor Nikola Tesla was certain that Martians were attempting to signal the planet Earth; Alexander Graham Bell said he was convinced that highly intelligent and civilized beings lived on Mars. H.G. Wells, influenced by Lowell’s work, wrote the 1898 novel “The War of the Worlds,” which depicts a violent invasion of Earth by technologically advanced Martians. The popular book further fueled the Mars craze.
“The Martians” is a fascinating tale that’s beautifully told; Baron is a lucid and elegant writer. The book is also rich with illustrations of primary sources, from newspaper articles to astronomers’ sketches, that bring the story to life. Significantly, Baron examines events with a wider lens, exploring the reasons behind the public’s willingness to believe Lowell’s fantastical claims.
The author argues that as a new century dawned, many Americans felt “unmoored.” Scientists had prompted existential angst by proving that Earth was “an unexceptional planet around an ordinary sun, merely one star out of millions.” At the same time, wondrous new technologies like radio and telegraphy, along with the invention of the automobile, created a feeling of limitless possibility, which included the potential of discovering life on other planets. “One could feel the anticipation of marvels as yet unknown, of a new era about to start,” Baron writes.
Science eventually won the day, as astronomers used powerful telescopes and advances in photography to debunk Lowell’s claims. No evidence, however, could convince Lowell, who remained stubbornly fixed in his ideas to the end of his life. “The difficulty in establishing the fact that Mars is inhabited lies not in the lack of intelligence on Mars, but rather in the lack of it here,” he seethed.
So what were the lines that Lowell and others observed on the planet Mars? Baron describes them as “an amalgam of misperceptions due to atmospheric distortion, the fallible human eye, and one man’s unconstrained imagination.”
Still, Baron credits that imagination with some salutary effects. He notes that Lowell’s unsound but popular claims forced other scientists to strengthen their own theories. In addition, he cites several notable figures who recalled being inspired by the Mars craze as children, from Robert H. Goddard, who ushered in the Space Age by inventing the first liquid-fueled rocket, to editor Hugo Gernsback, known as the father of science fiction. Ray Bradbury, author of 1950s “The Martian Chronicles,” once said, “There’s hardly a scientist or an astronaut I’ve met who wasn’t beholden to some romantic before him who led him to doing something in life.”
