Martian mania! Progressive-Era Americans craved communication with the red planet: new book

Still, their firm belief communication with the alien inhabitants of Earth’s planetary neighbor is possible happened because a two-decade long “Mars craze” had convinced the public civilized “people” populated the red planet.

That was mostly Percival Lowell’s doing.

Lowell was the scion of a wealthy Massachusetts family, but after college he asked for a debutante’s hand in marriage and then withdrew his proposal, getting himself exiled from polite society.

He fled to Japan, eventually returning to Boston and transforming himself into a dilettante astronomer. 

Lowell was backed by his family’s fortune and made the study of Mars his life’s work, although his success varied by the year.

Lowell thought he’d proved the existence of artificially constructed canals on the planet, structures only an intelligent species could have built.

The whole “canal” theory was first put forth by Giovanni Schiaparelli, a respected Italian scientist known to be quite absent-minded: He once abandoned his wife at a hotel because “I forgot I was married.”

But in 1877 Schiaparelli’s telescopic study of Mars led him to produce drawings of the planet that included a series of lines he likened to canali (channels). 

Thus began a decades-long rivalry between warring camps of astronomers, the “canalists” (who claimed the structures proved life on Mars) and the “anti-canalists” (who saw no canals nor proof of anything else).

Mars passed close to Earth in 1892, and the canals seemed visible again, to the great delight of newspapermen like Joseph Pulitzer, New York World editor. 

Regardless of its truth, Pulitzer ran with the story, blazing headlines on his daily like “Mars and Its Men” and “Come, Visit Mars.”

When California’s Lick Observatory believed it identified a triangle of lights on Mars’ surface, a media frenzy resulted.

Were the Martians trying to signal Earth through lights or lines? It was all anyone could talk about.

Earnest astronomers weren’t impressed though. “Fairy tales and wild speculations have no place in a serious science like astronomy,” one said.

In his first telescopic study of Mars, Percival Lowell couldn’t see the straight lines assumed to be canals. 

That might’ve been because he wasn’t a trained astronomer, with his initial viewings hampered when he didn’t fully open the telescope’s dome.

Lowell laughed off his inexperience and soon began to see thecanals though — and then he began to see them in duplicate, side by side.

“The canals of Mars have begun to double,” he announced to a waiting world.

Many serious astronomers denounced Lowell as an amateur, with the Lick Observatory director calling the idea of canals on Mars pure “bosh.” 

But Lowell charmed audiences on nationwide speaking tours into believing the canals proved life on Mars, claiming they were how the planet’s inhabitants transported water all over the desert-like orb.

“Irrigation,” Lowell said as if proven fact, “must be the all-engrossing Martian pursuit.”

The American public of the 1890s and 1900s loved the idea of space people: The Martians were everywhere!

H.G. Wells’ “The War of the Worlds” was serialized throughout 1897, exciting readers with its tale of a Martian invasion. 

There was a catchy new dance craze called “A Signal from Mars,” a Broadway show titled “A Message from Mars” and a vaudeville act starring the 32-inch Mrs. Tom Thumb named “A Peep at Mars.” 

Advertisers’ pitches included colorful posters of Martians begging for earthly products, with catchy slogans like “Send Us Up Some Pears’ Soap.”

But Wells himself suggested his fellow Earthlings might be getting silly when it came to Mars: As the popularity of bicycling began to sweep the world, for example, many people argued those canals were actually — yes, really — bike paths.

One American genius tried to soothe his countrymen’s fears of a Spanish-American war with a letter to the editor reminding them the US military has superweapons — based on the popular novel “Edison’s Conquest of Mars.”

The naysayers “seem to have forgotten all about Mr. Edison and his air ship, to say nothing of those disintegrators that played havoc with Mars and Martians.”

But while Lowell convinced many he’d found artificial canal structures — and thus life! — on the red planet, British astronomer Walter Maunder proved the folly of those claims. 

Maunder had a group of 11- to 15-year-old Royal Hospital School students sit at their desks and copy a map of Mars posted at the front of their classroom, but when the boys turned in their work he found the students had each produced different renditions of the same map.

Maunder believed that proved what could be seen of Mars’ surface via telescope would vary by person, the result of human error or optical illusion more than anything else.

That research gave Lowell’s reputation a hit, and the American seemed to have lost the battle of Mars’ canals.

But in 1907 the rich Bostonian bounced back with what he thought was the last word, when his Lowell expedition to the Andes photographed the planet for the first time. 

The pictures looked something like smudged orbs, but Lowell and others agreed careful study of them showed the canals he’d long claimed existed. 

The New York Sun concurred, saying the photos were “positive and final” proof of Lowell’s long-held beliefs. 

The Wall Street Journal said the biggest story of the year was “the proof afforded by the astronomical observations [of Lowell] that conscious, intelligent human life exists upon the planet Mars.”

Lowell was heralded as a visionary for that Mars photography, but only until 1909, when another astronomer on a clearer night with better equipment got superior pictures.

Taken from the Meudon Observatory outside Paris, Eugène Michel Antoniadi’s photographs showed that Lowell’s “canals” weren’t straight and weren’t lines but rather bunches of unconnected, smaller spots.

The structures Lowell heralded as artificially constructed canals were instead natural geographic elements of the planet’s surface.

There were, inarguably, no canals.

Percival Lowell’s personal philosophy was “Never admit you’ve made a mistake,” so he didn’t give up the fight. 

Not only did he continue to argue there were canals on Mars, he claimed he was still finding new ones. Plus water! And oxygen!

By his career’s end, the scientific community considered Lowell a “charlatan” who “fostered pseudoscience,” with the director of the Astronomical and Astrophysical Society of America in 1909 calling the gentleman astronomer’s work “the veriest rot.”

Lowell was more fondly remembered after his 1916 demise. Whether he’d proved the existence of life on Mars — spoiler alert: he did not — the man at least helped humanity dream of life in the stars.