[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]
Via Bad Astronomy comes news of an update to the Mars component of Google Earth. Most interesting to me are the overlays of historical maps of Mars from the 19th and 20th centuries, including those made by Giovanni Schiaparelli (1890), Percival Lowell (1896) and E. M. Antoniadi (1909). Schiaparelli and Lowell's maps showed the infamous canals of Mars; Antoniadi's more detailed map did not, and is supposed to have finished off the canals as a scientific controversy, at least according to according to Steven J. Dick's brilliant history The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). But from some of my own work I've seen evidence that the canals and the associated question of intelligent life on Mars survived into the 1920s. And now Google Earth shows me this beautiful map made by the US Air Force in 1962. This Mars was festooned with canals, half a century after they had largely been discarded by the scientific community.
A little digging shows why. The map, known as the MEC-1 prototype, was prepared to assist with the upcoming Mariner missions to Mars. E. C. Slipher, late director of the Lowell Observatory (a major centre for planetary research), helped make it. Slipher had got his start under Lowell himself in the late 1900s, and used his mentor's old observations to compile MEC-1. So it's no surprise it has canals, then. Slipher seems to have remained an advocate of the canals right up until his death in 1964. Perhaps fortunately for him, he didn't live to witness Mariner 4's flyby of Mars in 1965, which revealed an apparently dead planet. But if it had not, the USAF would have been well placed to explore the Martian megascale hydraulic system.
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There's some work --for which I've lost my bibliographic notes-- taking the canal discussion into WWI. Since the notion (as cultural phenomena) briefly held my flickering interest, I even looked at some old Areseological (Aereological? Ack, too many vowels!) stuff from the 50s. If the ice caps at the poles grow in winter and shrink in summer, and the vegetation grows at the equators every summer, there has to be a liquid transport mechanism of some kind, right?
And, therefore, advanced, pacific Martian technocrats fight against the drying of their home planet, just as equally superior Harvard graduates will soon have to do on Earth, until it is time for us all to flee to Venus and make new homes, subjugating the inferior Venusians (for their own good, maybe?) at the same time.
Look, don't blame me. Lowell proved it all. With Science. -
Areological, I think. Yes, there was still hope for a relatively wet Mars into the 1950s, with at least accompanying vegetation. One of the Arthur C. Clarke books I read as a kid was The Sands of Mars (1951) which has all this stuff. I knew the science it was based on was 30 years out of date but I still enjoyed it. That plus Cosmos (Blues for a red planet) is probably how I got into the history of areology ...
I'd be interested to know what the WWI-era thing was. In the 1920s and 1930s there was some buzz about radio communications to and/or from Mars, and I'd be interested to know when that died out.
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I've just been reading my son Arthur Ransome's _Winter Holiday_ which would have been written in 1931. 'Signalling to Mars' is one of the themes.
As for the dying out, my money would be on c.1943, when BISers and their fellow travellers started to 'accidentally' point their dishes at heavenly objects, with results varying from "Wow, Jupiter is a radio source" to "Nothing modulated is coming from Mars".
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The 1916 thing comes from an editorial in a Boston paper, basically Martians prove international-liberal-Unitarian-pacifism is right, therefore America should intervene in WWI.
Can't argue with logic like that!
More importantly, you can start to link Martian canals to other cultural tropes from China missionaries (China has canals!) to the TVA and Wittfogel (maybe canals are bad!). I was trying to bring all this stuff together lucidly in the draft introduction to my Unsolicited Manuscript of Doom, but then I thought to myself, "maybe an introduction shouldn't be 50 pages long," and it all had to be cut. -
Chris:
Thanks, that one gets filed away!
Hmm. The British in WWII did make some discoveries but radio astronomy didn't really take off until 1945. Radio emissions from Jupiter weren't discovered until 1955 (using the Mills Cross in Australia), so the possibility of weaker emissions from Mars couldn't be ruled out entirely. Doesn't mean anyone was still thinking about it by then, of course.
Erik:
No, there's no arguing with that kind of logic! It's a shame the canals weren't real; they would have simplified international relations considerably.
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1955? Wow. One of the great sensawunda moments of my life was when, aged about 9-12, I went to visit Jodrell Bank with my dad. There was a 20ft dish there which you could control, outputting to a classic rolling bit of paper with a pen on it. There were ephemerides (sp?) for various heavenly bodies, and we decided to point it at Jupiter, which was in the (daylight) sky at the time. Result: big blip on the page, and me wowed good. Had I known that _nobody_ had ever seen this result til 25 years previously, I'd have been wowed yet more.
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Well, you're one up on me -- I never got to drive a radio telescope, only optical ones! There's some info on the 1955 discovery here: http://radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/library/sci_briefs/discovery.html
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Pingback from Frog in a Well - The Korea History Group Blog on 2 April 2009 at 3:17 pm
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I'm surprised that nobody mentioned Nikola Tesla's 1899 claim to have received radio signals from Mars. It could very well be the starting point for the whole notion. As late as 1931 Tesla was still talking about the possibilty of communicating with beings on other planets.
I've visted Green Bank NRAO several times. IIRC, they've got a little scope visitors can use, as well as a replica of Karl Jansky's first radio-telescope and Frank Drake's Project Ozma scope.
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You're quite right, Tesla did claim (or allow others to infer ... he could be cagey at times) that he had received radio signals from Mars. (Marconi was involved in a similar episode after WWI.) But that was well after Percival Lowell and others were making well-publicised claims for the existence of canals and hence life on Mars. (Lowell's first book on the subject, Mars, was published in 1895.)
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