In 1877, Giovanni Schiaparelli, an Italian astronomer (and uncle of the fashion icon Elsa), started making a map of the surface of Mars, which was then at one of the closest points to Earth in its orbit. Schiaparelli was color-blind, but this affliction may have increased his ability to see geometric outlines, and what he observed on Mars was extraordinary: not only shapes that resembled oceans but long, straight lines between them. The lines were mysterious—“They may disappear wholly, or be nebulous or indistinct, or be so strongly marked as a pen line,” Schiaparelli observed—and would sometimes even double up. Schiaparelli wasn’t sure what they represented, but he dubbed them “channels,” or, in Italian, canali. In the Anglophone world, they soon became “canals.”
About fifteen years later, a Boston Brahmin named Percival Lowell fell under the spell of Schiaparelli’s “canals.” Born in 1855, Lowell had spent his twenties and thirties touring Japan and Korea, which had just opened up to the West, and writing about his experiences, but in the eighteen-nineties he turned his attention—and considerable means—toward the cosmos. Lowell was an amateur, but he hired two Harvard-affiliated astronomers who knew what they were doing, founded a namesake observatory in Arizona, acquired top-notch equipment, and began observing Mars for himself. In 1895, he would assert, in a series of lectures, that the lines on the planet’s surface were proof of a highly sophisticated irrigation system, feeding oases where the inhabitants of Mars would tend crops to survive an otherwise hostile environment; the system was suggestive of “a mind of no mean order,” Lowell said, one of “considerably more comprehensiveness than that which presides over the various departments of our own public works.” Lowell made his case with such “seeming logic” and “disarming humility,” the journalist David Baron writes in his new book, “The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America,” that, if Baron had attended Lowell’s lectures, he could imagine himself having been “swept along.”
In the initial years after Schiaparelli observed his canals, no one credible believed that they were of intelligent design, despite some chatter to that effect in the press. (As Baron notes, the word “Martians” was not even in common usage yet, with reports instead referring inconsistently to “Marsians,” “Marsonians,” “Marsites,” or “Martials.”) Lowell’s lectures, reproduced in The Atlantic Monthly and in book form, began to sell the public on the idea, and, as American popular culture started to become more unified, Mars—and Martians—became a meme, popping up everywhere from advertisements to vaudeville. “The War of the Worlds,” H. G. Wells’s terrifying tale of a Martian invasion of London, found an audience in the U.S., and the engineer Nikola Tesla claimed to have detected a signal from Martians trying to contact Earth. The sensationalist yellow press, at the peak of its influence at the time, lapped it all up.