Wall Street titans funding a charismatic inventor obsessed with Mars. A Boston astronomer insisting he has evidence of life beyond our planet, much to the dismay of his more parsimonious peers. A mass movement convinced that the solar system holds the future for human society.
Tech may have changed in the last century, but the storylines haven’t. Today’s interest in the Red Planet—and the personalities driving it—has a lot in common with the Martian mania that swept the country at the turn of the 20th century.
Summer reading: “The Martians,” a new book from science writer David Baron published today, recounts the story of the “canals” of Mars and their impact on the world. The story should be of interest to any space fan, both because it reveals the origins of how people see the universe, and how it rhymes with today’s push into the solar system.
Prized possession: Just like the Ansari XPRIZE helped set off the private space race in 1996, in 1891, the wealthy French widow Anne-Émilie-Clara Goguet Guzman left 100,000 francs as a prize to any astronomer who could communicate with “any planet or star.”
Astronomers like the Italian Giovanni Schiaparelli, observing the planet through telescopes and sketching what they saw, had identified what became known as “canals” on Mars. In the 1890s, American Percival Lowell, a wealthy heir from Boston, became convinced these were a planetary irrigation project built by the inhabitants of Mars, and the book follows his work funding observatories and promoting the idea of Martians.
Tesla to Mars: It’s not just a Falcon Heavy launch. Nikola Tesla, the namesake of Elon Musk’s electric car company, believed he had detected signals from Mars and sought to win the Guzman prize. While building a radio tower on Long Island, funded by JP Morgan, Tesla’s burn rate overcame him: He ran out of money and couldn’t get Morgan to sign on for a Series B. “If you find some millionaire who will listen to me, we shall know more,” about life on Mars, he later wrote to a friend.
Meet Marvin: Many astronomers thought Lowell’s deductions went too far, but that didn’t stop—and probably helped—Mars capture the popular imagination. At the height of the yellow press, Mars fever led to wild theories about the planet’s potential inhabitants. Why do so many depictions of Martians feature antennae? A zoologist suggested they might be similar to ants, the media seized on the idea, “and thus did the Martians evolve.”
Scientific progress goes boink: Resolving the Martian debate took years, as larger telescopes were built and a greater understanding of human psychology developed. The canals of Mars were artifacts of the mind interpreting the distant planet’s geography through atmospheric interference. In 1909, the astronomer E.M. Antoniadi, working at the Muedon Observatory, produced maps of Mars that captured its natural appearance and settled the public debate.
Deep impact: Why would people believe in Martians? It was a time of great technological progress—bicycles, cars, airplanes, balloons, and the radio were all popularized in this era, even as massive social changes primed people to look beyond their every-day lives.
The legacy of this fad is dispute: While Baron documents astronomers like Gerard Kuiper, who lamented the impact of the mistaken theory as late as the 1960s, others, like Carl Sagan, point to the inspiration factor: Lowell’s writings on Mars inspired Robert Goddard, the inventor of the liquid rocket engine, and laid the foundations for the golden age of science fiction.
And the books of Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein, however misunderstood, helped give us Elon Musk.
