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In the 1800s,
observatories with large telescopes were built around
the world. In 1877, Giovanni Virginio
Schiaparelli (1835-1910), director of the Brera
Observatory in Milan, began mapping and naming areas on
Mars. He named the Martian "seas" and "continents" (dark
and light areas) with names from historic and mythological
sources. He saw channels on Mars and called them "canali."
Canali means channels, but it was mistranslated into "canals"
implying intelligent life on Mars. Because of the then
recent completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 (the engineering
wonder of the era), the misinterpretation was taken to
mean that large-scale artificial structures had been discovered
on Mars. The importance of canals for worldwide commerce
at that time without a doubt influenced the popular interest
in "canals" on Mars.
In 1894, Percival
Lowell, a wealthy astronomer from Boston, made
his first observations of Mars from a private observatory
that he built in Flagstaff, Arizona (Lowell
Observatory). He decided that the canals were
real and ultimately mapped hundreds of them. Lowell believed
that the straight lines were artificial canals created
by intelligent Martians and were built to carry water
from the polar caps to the equatorial regions. In 1895,
he published his first book on Mars
with many illustrations and, over the next two decades,
published two more popular books advancing his ideas.
LOWELL OBSERVATORY IMAGES
LOWELL DRAWINGS
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Lowell's theories
influenced the young English writer H.G. Wells,
who in 1898 published The
War of the Worlds. In this novel,
Wells created an invasion of Earth by deadly
aliens from Mars and launched a whole new
genre of alien science fiction.
On
Halloween in 1938, Orson Welles and The Mercury
Theater on the Air broadcast a radio
version of The War of the Worlds.
The story, presented as a series of "live"
news bulletins, panicked thousands of listeners
who believed that America was being attacked
by hostile Martians.
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Most experienced
astronomers never saw the Martian "canals" and for a good
reason. We now know that they never existed! The network
of crisscrossing lines covering the surface of Mars was
only a product of the human tendency to see patterns,
even when patterns do not exist. When looking at a faint
group of dark smudges, the eye tends to connect them with
straight lines. This has been demonstrated by many laboratory
and field experiments.
Before
we were able to send spacecrafts to Mars, we used
other instruments and techniques to learn about the
planet.
Questions
to think about:
- How are the images from ground-based observatories
different from those made with small telescopes?
- What new information and speculations can you make
about what Mars might be like from these images?
Next... Mars
Rocks! What is Mars Like? (pg. 4 of 13) |
