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Even before Schiaparelli’s observations, astronomers had watched the bright polar caps change size with the seasons and had seen variations in the dark surface features. With a little imagination, it was not difficult to picture the canals as long fields of crops bordering irrigation ditches that brought water from the melting polar ice to the parched deserts of the red planet. (They assumed the polar caps were composed of water ice, which isn’t exactly true, as we will see shortly.)
Until has death in 1916, the most effective proponent of intelligent life on Mars was Percival Lowell , a self-made American astronomer and member of the wealthy Lowell family of Boston (see the feature box on Percival Lowell: Dreaming of an Inhabited Mars ). A skilled author and speaker, Lowell made what seemed to the public to be a convincing case for intelligent Martians, who had constructed the huge canals to preserve their civilization in the face of a deteriorating climate ( [link] ).
The argument for a race of intelligent Martians, however, hinged on the reality of the canals, a matter that remained in serious dispute among astronomers. The canal markings were always difficult to study, glimpsed only occasionally because atmospheric conditions caused the tiny image of Mars to shimmer in the telescope. Lowell saw canals everywhere (even a few on Venus), but many other observers could not see them at all and remained unconvinced of their existence. When telescopes larger than Lowell’s failed to confirm the presence of canals, the skeptics felt vindicated. Now it is generally accepted that the straight lines were an optical illusion, the result of the human mind’s tendency to see order in random features that are glimpsed dimly at the limits of the eye’s resolution. When we see small, dim dots of surface markings, our minds tend to connect those dots into straight lines.
Percival Lowell was born into the well-to-do Massachusetts family about whom John Bossidy made the famous toast:
And this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots
And the Cabots talk only to God.
Percival’s brother Lawrence became president of Harvard University, and his sister, Amy, became a distinguished poet. Percival was already interested in astronomy as a boy: he made observations of Mars at age 13. His undergraduate thesis at Harvard dealt with the origin of the solar system, but he did not pursue this interest immediately. Instead, he entered the family business and traveled extensively in Asia. In 1892, however, he decided to dedicate himself to carrying on Schiaparelli’s work and solving the mysteries of the martian canals.
In 1894, with the help of astronomers at Harvard but using his own funds, Lowell built an observatory on a high plateau in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he hoped the seeing would be clear enough to show him Mars in unprecedented detail. He and his assistants quickly accumulated a tremendous number of drawings and maps, purporting to show a vast network of martian canals (see [link] ). He elaborated his ideas about the inhabitants of the red planet in several books, including Mars (1895) and Mars and Its Canals (1906), and in hundreds of articles and speeches.
As Lowell put it,
A mind of no mean order would seem to have presided over the system we see—a mind certainly of considerably more comprehensiveness than that which presides over the various departments of our own public works. Party politics, at all events, have had no part in them; for the system is planet-wide. . . . Certainly what we see hints at the existence of beings who are in advance of, not behind us, in the journey of life.
Lowell’s views captured the public imagination and inspired many novels and stories, the most famous of which was H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (1897). In this famous “invasion” novel, the thirsty inhabitants of a dying planet Mars (based entirely on Lowell’s ideas) come to conquer Earth with advanced technology.
Although the Lowell Observatory first became famous for its work on the martian canals, both Lowell and the observatory eventually turned to other projects as well. He became interested in the search for a ninth (and then undiscovered) planet in the solar system. In 1930, Pluto was found at the Lowell Observatory, and it is not a coincidence that the name selected for the new planet starts with Lowell’s initials. It was also at the Lowell Observatory that the first measurements were made of the great speed at which galaxies are moving away from us, observations that would ultimately lead to our modern view of an expanding universe.
Lowell ( [link] ) continued to live at his observatory, marrying at age 53 and publishing extensively. He relished the debate his claims about Mars caused far more than the astronomers on the other side, who often complained that Lowell’s work was making planetary astronomy a less respectable field. At the same time, the public fascination with the planets fueled by Lowell’s work (and its interpreters) may, several generations later, have helped fan support for the space program and the many missions whose results grace the pages of our text.
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