By the mid-1800s, telescopes had transformed Mars from a mythological figure into a world. As it came into focus, Mars became a planet with weather, shifting terrains, and ice caps like Earth’s. “The very first time we had a way to look at Mars through the eyepiece, we started discovering things that were changing,” says the SETI Institute’s Nathalie Cabrol, who has studied Mars for decades. With more advanced instruments, this dynamic place could be studied and mapped.
During the Victorian era, astronomers sketched the Martian surface and presented their drawings as fact, although the whims and biases of the mapmakers influenced their final products. In 1877, one of those maps captured international attention. As drawn by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, Mars had harshly delineated topography, with islands that erupted from dozens of canals, which he colored blue. Schiaparelli stuffed his map with detail, and instead of conforming to contemporary naming conventions, he labeled the exotic features on his version of the planet after places in Mediterranean mythologies. “That was a really massively bold statement to make,” says Maria Lane, a historical geographer at the University of New Mexico, “It’s basically him saying, I saw so much stuff that was so different from what anyone else had seen, I can’t even use the same names.”
As a result, Lane says, Schiaparelli’s map was instantly authoritative. Scientific and popular opinion pronounced it a powerful representation of truth. Three decades of unconstrained Mars mania followed, and by the end, any reasonable person would be forgiven for believing intelligent Martians had built a planet-spanning network of canals. Much of that fervor can be linked directly to Percival Lowell, a quirky aristocrat with a serious Mars obsession. A wealthy Bostonian and Harvard University alum, Lowell had more than a passing interest in astronomy, and he was an avid reader of scientific and popular texts. Inspired in part by Schiaparelli’s maps, and believing that alien technology had crafted the Martian canals, Lowell raced to build a hilltop observatory before the autumn of 1894, when Mars would make a close approach to Earth and its fully sunlit face would be prime for observing those supposed canals.
With the help of some friends and his family fortune, the Lowell Observatory emerged that year near Flagstaff, Arizona, on a steep bluff that the locals named Mars Hill. From there, among the conifers, he dutifully studied the red planet, waiting night after night for the shimmering world to come into focus. Based on his observations and sketches, Lowell not only thought he could confirm Schiaparelli’s maps, he believed he spotted an additional 116 canals. “The more you look through the eyepiece, the more you’re going to start seeing straight lines,” Cabrol says. “Because this is what the human brain does.”
In Lowell’s estimation, the Martian canal builders were supremely intelligent beings capable of planetary-scale engineering, an alien race intent on surviving a devastating change in climate that forced them to build mammoth irrigation canals stretching from the poles to the equator. Lowell published his observations prodigiously, and his conviction was infectious. Even Nikola Tesla, the electric pioneer who famously sparred with rival inventor Thomas Edison, got caught up in the moment and reported detecting radio signals coming from Mars in the early 1900s.
But Lowell’s story began to fall apart in 1907, in part because of a project he funded. That year, astronomers took thousands of photos of Mars through a telescope and shared them with the world. Planetary photography eventually replaced cartography as “truth,” Lane says. Once people could see for themselves how the photos and maps of Mars didn’t match, they no longer bought into the authority of Lowell’s maps. Still, by the turn of the 20th century, Mars had become a familiar neighbor with changing landscapes and the lingering promise of inhabitants. The next wave of observations revealed that seasonally, the Martian polar caps shrank and expanded, unleashing a swath of darkness that crawled toward the equator. Some scientists in the 1950s thought those shadowy areas had to be vegetation that flourished and died back, theories that made it into top-tier journals. All this scientific fervor fueled a trove of speculative fiction, from H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom serials to Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles.
Question: What developments and events were responsible for spreading misinformation about Mars? Answer this question in about 150 words. (24 points)
