The year is 1877.
Your name is Giovanni Schiaparelli, and you’re looking up at the night sky.
Recent advancements in telescopes allow you to peer deeper into the heavens than ever
before.
Over the length of your career you’d come to push mankind's knowledge of binary stars,
discover asteroids, and realize the relation between meteor showers and comets, but above
all that, your observations tonight would come to define your legacy.
Although the telescope had been invented more than two hundred years prior, modern astronomy
was still in its infancy.
Much was still unknown about the workings of the heavens after the fall of the Ptolemaic
view of the solar system with Earth it’s center.
Giants such as Galileo, Newton, and Kepler had laid the foundations, but you knew much
was yet to be discovered.
As you gaze upon the marvels of the heavens, you come across the red Titan, Mars, named
after the mythic Roman god of War.
As one of the five planets visible to the naked eye, Mars had been known about since
antiquity, but tonight you notice something different.
With the aid of a state of the art telescope, you notice a dense network of linear structures
across the surface of the red planet.
In your notes, you begin to make the first in a series of detailed drawings about the
dark lines covering the martian surface.
You call them ‘canali’ meaning channels in your Italian tongue, referring to the shape
of the lines.
You don't know it yet, but these ‘canali’ would go on to spark one of the greatest astronomical
debates of the 20th century, but they would prove to be an optical illusion, a star gazers
mind playing tricks on them in the night time.
In 1878, after months of detailed observations, you publish your findings, setting the stage
for what was yet to come.
It didn’t matter that nobody else at the time saw your neat, regimented lines; many
others would come to see them too.
Your findings are reported throughout the scientific community, but across the ocean
the pivotal description of your ‘canali’ is mistranslated.
Instead of its proper translation of channel, inferring nothing about the line’s origins,
it’s mistranslated to canal, by definition, man-made, or in this case martian-made.
These findings caught the eye of Percival Lowell, an american astronomer, determined
to make a name for himself in the astronomical world.
Lowell read about Schiaperille’s work, and he set out to study the canals of mars and
uncover their purpose.
In 1894 he built a new observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, coincidentally, the same observatory
that just a few decades later would uncover a small icy rock at the edge of our Solar
System, Pluto.
But now, for the next fifteen years, he studied Mars extensively, and made intricate drawings
of the surface markings as he perceived them.
Lowell published his views in a series of three books: [Mars (1895), Mars and Its Canals
(1906), and Mars As the Abode of Life (1908)].
With these writings, Lowell more than anyone else, popularized the belief that these markings
showed that Mars sustained intelligent life forms.
In his books, Lowell put forth a theory that the canals were visible traces of a dwindling
civilization's attempts to tap the planet's polar ice caps.
This idea wasn’t too far fetched.
The late 19th century was a period of great canal-building on the home planet–the Suez
and Panama Canals were both freshly dug at the end of the 1800s–and so the dreamy hypothesis
that Schiaparelli's canali were irrigation canals made by intelligent beings resonated
in the minds of the people.
*listen to all recordings*
About his research, Lowell would go on to say "That Mars is inhabited by beings of some
sort of other we may consider as certain as it is uncertain what those beings may be."
Although Schiaparelli was more restrained in his writings of the origin and use of the
his canali.
In his book Life on Mars, Schiaparelli wrote: "Rather than true channels in a form familiar
to us, we must imagine depressions in the soil that are not very deep, extended in a
straight direction for thousands of miles, over a width of 100, 200 kilometers and maybe
more.
I have already pointed out that, in the absence of rain on Mars, these channels are probably
the main mechanism by which the water (and with it organic life) can spread on the dry
surface of the planet."
Schiaparelli and Lowel weren’t alone in their observations, many astronomers seconded
Schiaparelli's initial observations.
The Irish astronomer Charles E. Burton, and the Danish astronomer Jon Dreyer both published
their sketches of the Martian lines in the fourth edition of Celestial Objects, a prominent
astronomical edition of the time (1881).
But the consensus was far from unanimous.
Edward Maunder at the Royal Observatory in London began challenging the prevailing narrative.
He conducted visual experiments using circular disks, marked with small, discrete black dots.
In viewing them from a distance he noted that one’s eye seemed to imagine lines connecting
the dots, where none truly were.
This led him to conclude, correctly, that the viewing of canals arose as an optical
illusion.
Maunder was also convinced that there cannot be life "as in our world" on Mars, as there
were no temperature-equating winds and too low mean temperatures.
Over time, the consensus started to shift.
In 1909, French astronomer Eugene Antoniadi, who had long supported Lowell’s beliefs,
began observing Mars at the Meudon Observatory in Paris, the largest telescope in all of
Europe.
What he saw too began to challenge Lowell’s 15 years of canal-mania.
By 1910, new photographic technologies began further questioning the existence of such
canals..
Coincidentally, Schiaparelli died in 1910.
Lowell’s obituary for him would be the last time he actively defended the dream of the
Martian canals.
With Schiapearelli’s death, and Lowell’s end to the canal-mania, the belief in the
canals began to supcided from the public conscious.
Although papers in scientific publications would continue to debate the subject for decades.
The final nail in the coffin came with the arrival of Mariner 4 in 1965, which took high
resolution images of the martian surface, revealing impact craters, large mountains,
but a complete absence of canals.
The scientific hysteria behind the martian men died down, but lived on in science fiction
books and movies, depicting martian civilizations coming to earth to take our bountiful resources.
Today, the most common belief as to the cause of the canali supports Edward Maunder’s
belief that it was an optical illusion created by the mind seeing lines between the dark
craters scattering the Martian surface, in the fuzzy images of their telescopes.
You can see this for yourself by staring at a collection of black dots and seeing a series
of dark lines begin to connect them.
Still, others have suggested, based on Lowell reporting a near identical canal system on
Venus, that he, and others like him, may have been observing the projections of the veins
in their eyes on the surface of the planets, a known nuisance among planetary observers
using high magnification.
However, recent discoveries may shed even more light on this century old conundrum.
This past August, scientists found dozens of mountains across the southern hemisphere
of Mars where previously undetected dark streaks come and go with the seasons.
When the planet heats up, the streaks appear and expand downhill, then disappear when it
gets cold, which may be evidence of salty water running down slopes during the Martian
summer.
Although we may never know, perhaps this played a role in Schiaparelli and Lowell’s observations.
Although Schiaperlili had a long and storied career studying the cosmos, and never officially
supported the idea that his findings proved the existence of intelligent life on Mars,
it ended up becoming his largest legacy, and what he is most remembered for today.
All because of a mistranslation….
This was the first in a series of scientific stories I plan on telling, explaining how
important breakthroughs and misconceptions came to be.
If you know any stories you want told, be sure to leave them in the comment section
below, and if you enjoyed the episode, consider subscribing, and remember there is always
more to learn.