So, to wrap up this accidental series. To check whether professional astronomical journals displayed the same patterns in discussing 'Mars' and 'canals' as the more popular/amateur ones I again looked at the peak decade 1891-1900, this time selecting only the more serious, respected journals. However, because of the French problem I had to exclude L'Astronomie and Ciel et Terre (the former was apparently more popular anyway). So for my top three I ended up with Astronomische Nachrichten, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PASP) and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS). Astronomische Nachrichten ('astronomical notes') was the leading astronomical journal of the 19th century, founded 1821. It published articles in a number of languages including English. Fulltext Service seems to be multilingual, as it picks up the German (at least) equivalents of Mars/Martian and canal/canals. That doesn't help with the French problem, but that will only affect a small minority of Astronomische Nachrichten's articles. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific was founded in California as a joint amateur-professional organisation. Its PASP is now a very highly regarded journal, although I must admit I don't know if this was always the case. MNRAS is the journal of the Royal Astronomical Society in Britain. It also happens to be where my solitary peer-reviewed astronomy article was published (and when I say 'my', I think approximately 1 sentence relates to research I actually undertook), but even so it really is a highly-respected journal.
Astronomische Nachrichten published by far the most articles mentioning 'Mars' and 'canals'. Interestingly, this was in the 1900s, not the 1890s. The numbers decline rapidly thereafter: there were still a fair few in the 1910s, but hardly any in the 1920s and none at all after then. PASP's peak was in the 1890s, when it published exactly as many articles as Astronomische Nachrichten. There was a big fall in the 1900s, but unusually its level of interest in Martian canals, at least as measured by the number of articles mentioning 'Mars' and 'canals', stayed reasonably constant throughout the 20th century, at a bit over one a year. It must be said, however, that one article a year is not exactly indicative of an obsession. We are getting into some small numbers here. MNRAS's numbers are even smaller, though like Astronomische Nachrichten they peaked in the 1890s and then exceeded that level in the 1900s.
Just for completeness, here's the ratio of articles mentioning of 'Mars' and 'canals' to those mentioning 'Mars' alone. Because of the small numbers not much weight can be placed on this, but it does suggest that PASP's interest in the canals in the 20th century tracked its interest in Mars fairly closely. Also noteworthy is that Astronomische Nachrichten has peaks in both graphs in the 1900s, which is also when it published the most mentioning 'Mars' (859 in total). That is, even as the number of articles on Martian canals (yada yada) increased in absolute terms, they also increased as a proportion of the number on Mars altogether, to nearly 10%. So this is consistent with the picture of the 1900s as the peak decade for the canals controversy, not the 1890s as I had originally assumed.
The upshot of this is not a lot. I think these plots do match the patterns I found in the previous posts, but only weakly. What's really worrying is the small numbers. If these are the three professional journals which published the most articles on the Martian canals (and there may be other gaps in the ADS database), then apart from Astronomische Nachrichten in the 1890s and 1900s (and maybe in the 1910s) and PASP in the 1890s (and maybe the 1920s and 1930s) they didn't really publish very much; and, of necessity, the other professional journals published even less. So can it really be said that professional astronomers — as opposed to amateur astronomers and for that matter the public — as a whole were particularly interested in (let alone persuaded by) the Martian canals hypothesis? I'm not sure. Indeed, I'm not sure whether this exercise has shown anything at all, other than the need to look very carefully at your data, even when the story it is telling seems to make sense. The only way to find the answers, really, is to dig much deeper into the data, and start reading the articles themselves and put them in context: quantitative history alone isn't good enough. Which is quite reassuring, actually.
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If you run "Martian canals" through http://books.google.com/ngrams you get the same basic plot (within one second): nothing at all before the 1880s, a sharp peak around 1908 and "lingering interest" til the present, with a secondary peak around 1960. And again, there is no telling whether the respective book sections are pro or contra the existence of the canals or mere historical reviews.
Sigh. I kind of liked your crazypants correspondent, Brett. At least he'd mapped out a theory where the canals could actually exist. Although there is the bit about sending the Air Force to blow up all the Martians, and killing JFK because he knew too much, which isn't quite as attractive as imagining that the Towers of Truth still stand along Mars's Grand Canal.
Just so that everyone is aware of it, I will also mention Maria K. de Lane's [i]Geographies of Mars[/i], a good start on what could easily be a much larger field of studies into the way that the imagined geographies of Mars were deployed on Earth in a cosmic history of human civilisation. There's just so much stuff there about the way that images of the "dying," canal-watered Mars served the needs of everyone from eugenicists like Lowell's brother to grand historical theorists like Wittfogel.
Daniel:
Thanks. I didn't use Google's Ngram Viewer for this because I was interested in the astronomical response to the Martian canals. You can't get that from Google because there's no way to search scientific literature alone, let alone astronomical ones. That's why I was pleased to find the ADS Fulltext Service. Still, that it does turn out much the same is interesting. And perhaps expected, given that I've more or less concluded here that even in the refereed subset of ADS Fulltext Service, the signal here is dominated by popular-ish journals, whereas it's not clear at all that the more professional ones were interested.
Erik:
Well, you might have helped him out a bit then!
Thanks for that reference, I think I've seen it around but will have to pick it up now. Also, apparently Joshua Nall at Cambridge did his PhD on the public reception of the Martian canals. A long time ago (i.e. before the PhD, in fact before I started studying history formally) I did think of going into the history of the perceptions and uses of Mars myself, and these few posts are the remnants of that interest. I haven't kept up with the literature though, I'm glad to see that there's some interesting work being done on the topic.
A very good series of articles. With respect to your question:
"So can it really be said that professional astronomers — as opposed to amateur astronomers and for that matter the public — as a whole were particularly interested in (let alone persuaded by) the Martian canals hypothesis? "
The answer is clearly "no". For the most part, judging from what I have read by Patrrick Moore and Carl Sagan, most planetary astronomy between 1900 and 1960 (inlcuding lunar work) was done by amateurs. Most professional astronomers were much more interested in stellar and galactic astronomy.
Glad you enjoyed them! Something a bit different for me, topic-wise.
From the way I phrased that question, yes, that's quite right. But what I actually had in mind was that part of the professional astronomical community which took an interest in (and might therefore publish on, which is the metric I'm using here) such questions, i.e. professional planetary astronomers. After all, an astronomer who has devoted their professional life to studying supernovae remnants is unlikely to publish many articles on Mars, let alone Martian canals, and quite probably would not be current in the literature.
That said, I think there was more crossover than might be thought. Astronomy was much smaller back then, and the advance of specialisation uneven. Many notable professional astronomers who are better known for their contributions to stellar and galactic astronomy did in fact do at least some planetary work. Vesto Slipher comes to mind: famous for being the first to measure the radial velocity of a galaxy, in fact he was a planetary specialist like his brother Earl (who was involved in compiling the 1962 USAF Mars map). E. E. Barnard, the great stellar astronomer after whom Barnard's Star is named, spent a great deal of time observing the planets: he made the first discovery of a Jovian moon since Galileo, for example. In the mid-20th century, the French astronomer Gérard de Vaucouleurs published his own research on Mars and organised a worldwide Mars patrol for the 1956 opposition. In fact, as I recall learning of de Vaucouleurs' interest in Mars was one of the sparks for my own interest in the present topic, because I knew him better as one of the outstanding galactic astronomers of the late 20th century, coauthor of the standard Third Reference Catalogue of Bright Galaxies, etc.
Turning to more empirical evidence, one of the plots in the first post in this series simply showed the frequency of 'Mars' in refereed journals, and there's really not much of a decline until the 1940s, and even then it is above the level of the 1880s. As I've noted, however, there are problems with this data. (One problem relevant to this question is I don't know what the proportion of the astronomers publishing refereed articles mentioning 'Mars' were professionals. At least some will have been amateurs.) Looking at the same three journals I've used in this post, PASP mostly replicated this pattern with fluctuations, though with a big spike in the 1950s (probably due to in part to the aforementioned Mars patrol); MNRAS was much the same but at a lower level and without the spike. Interestingly, Astronomische Nachrichten seems to have stopped publishing articles on Mars altogether around 1940. Maybe planetary astronomy was deemed unvölkisch or bourgeois (it was published in East Germany after 1945) but also at some point Astronomische Nachrichten did stop being a general astronomical journal and began narrowing its focus, so maybe that was why. Anyway, the number of articles mentioning 'Mars' had already more than halved between the 1900s and the 1920s, so it was already declining. But in overall, it seems to me that Mars was being studied at about the same level in the first four decades of the 20th century, though the peak was clearly in the 1900s. Equally there was a lull from the 1940s but this was only relative and of course interest began to revive when space probes started being sent there.
It might be interesting to plot the publications on the Moon and Jupiter to see there was indeed a general drop in interest in planetary astronomy. Both bodies have surfaces and cloud tops respectively that can be readily seen through even small telescopes. And compare these (and the Mars data) againt total astronomical publications, to see relative interest.
On the French connection, from memory the observatory at Pic du Midi was one of the other major centres for planetary research apart from Flagstaff and generally took a very negative view of canals.
BTW The Flagstaff observatory is well worth a visit and of course Flagstaff now is the centre for the USGS astrogeological branch
Yes, that would be useful to look at; but somebody else will have to do it! Well, here's a stab at it anyway. You can actually use the ADS Fulltext Service itself to generate some quick and dirty numbers — it even provides a little thumbnail graph of the numbers (under 'Publication Year' on the left, you may have to click on the triangle to open it out). For 'moon' (it doesn't care about case so this will pick up other references to other moons, but given the idea is to check how popular planetary astronomy was that's no problem) the number of refereed articles nearly tripled from the 1870s to the 1880s, then nearly doubled in the 1890s, and then stayed at a roughly constant level until the 1940s and 1950s when it fell back to the 1890s level. Not until the 1960s did it pick up again. It's much the same for 'Jupiter', though with a much bigger peak in the 1890s (when interest in 'moon' was still growing). You can see the numbers for all articles without specifying a search term, to compare the total volume of astronomical literature as you suggest. Here the numbers are a little different. There are also jumps in the 1870s and 1880s and the 1890s appear as a definite watershed, with the number of articles doubling from the previous decade. But whereas in planetary studies things were relatively stable between 1900 and 1940, overall there was a relatively small but steady increase in that period. In the 1940s there is the same decline (interesting that WWII seems to have a clear impact where WWI does not — a more total war, I guess), but things pick up quickly in the 1950s, in fact the dip in the 1940s seems to have had no longterm affect at all. Finally there is a huge growth in the 1960s, at more than double the level of the 1950s.
So what that says to me (speculation alert) is that planetary astronomy grew rapidly in the last few decades of the 19th century; but after 1900 did not share in the expansion of astronomy as a whole and was not able recover from the slowdown during WWII until the 1960s. In demographic terms that suggests that a large number of astronomers went into planetary astronomy in the 1890s and 1900s and stayed there for their working lives, say about 30 or 40 years; but that they were not very successful at reproducing (i.e. recruiting graduate students) and so once the 1890s/1900s cohort began retiring they were often not replaced and the field began to decline. WWII perhaps accelerated this trend, but the Space Race reversed it and planetary astronomy clearly became sexy again in the 1960s.
I vaguely know Josh, but I'd forgotten about his work when reading these posts- I'll point him in your direction when I next see him.
Thanks, Jacob.