the canals of mars --7/1/26
Today's selection-- from The Martians by David Baron. In 1894, Percival Lowell used an advanced telescope mounted in the desert of Arizona to study the canals of Mars:
"Nearly every living astronomer will agree with me in saying, as I do, that there is no reasonable probability whatever of any such settlement [of the question of Mars's habitation] at the present time.’
“Perhaps proud that he was already stirring attention in his new field of study, Lowell mailed a copy of Holden's critique to his family. His mother answered. ‘Holden seems like a fly that only comes back to the same place to tickle and rouse you again,’ she wrote consolingly to her son, who was on a train to Flagstaff. ‘Good-bye my darling may you discover more problems in Mars!’
“[Percival] Lowell, the fashionable bachelor who had once found contentment flitting back and forth· between Boston and Tokyo, now enjoyed splitting his time between New England and Arizona. He came to appreciate the rough, pure existence of the manly West–the wild scenery, the plainspoken people, even ‘the young Flagstaff band that is learning to play in tune.’ Lowell trod the dirt streets in evening darkness as he walked the mile from his hotel downtown to the telescope on Mars Hill. He and his assistants divided the night into watches, taking turns at the eyepiece and occasionally sleeping in a tent within the dome. (Later, Lowell would build a cottage, then a house, beside the observatory.) Curious townsfolk and tourists occasionally interrupted the routine. ‘Are you observatory people?’ a voice called out from a passing carriage one August eve as the astronomers ascended the hill. Lowell responded affirmatively and cordially, inviting the vehicle's passengers up for a view of the stars. His guests marveled as they peered through the glass. ‘Just like diamonds,’ they effused.
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| A 1962 map of Mars published by the U.S. Aeronautical Chart and Information Center, showing canals snaking through the Martian landscape. |
“Lowell's own gaze remained fixed on Mars, and as the weeks passed, he watched a drama unfold. When he began his observations, in June, it was early spring in the Martian southern hemisphere, which tilted favorably toward Earth. As the season progressed, Lowell traced the effects of the clement weather. The white expanse around the South Pole, which at first so impressed him with its bright sparkles, began to shrink. ‘Snow-cap exceedingly small,’ he jotted in his logbook in mid-August. Then two months later, when it was summer in the south of Mars, the polar cap vanished. ‘No snow; certainly to speak of’ Lowell believed, as did many in his time, that the white patches he saw on Mars consisted of frozen water, and he tried to suss out where the presumed moisture went when it melted. ‘So much water suddenly produced has got to be disposed of,’ he noted quizzically as the snows disappeared. Meanwhile, other features emerged. ‘Suspicions of canals,’ he wrote tentatively in his logbook.
“Mars divulged its secrets reluctantly. To see the ghostly lines that Schiaparelli had traced on his maps took practice and patience. Even through the Lowell Observatory's powerful lens, even under cloudless skies, fine details on the Martian surface were difficult to discern because the image through the glass tended to wobble and blur, a problem due not to the telescope but to Earth's atmosphere. In space, the stars do not twinkle; celestial objects appear to shimmer because we view the heavens from the bottom of an ocean of air. Warm and cold currents in the atmosphere bend the light, as when summer heat rising from pavement seems to jiggle the horizon. The effect through a telescope is, as is-everything, magnified. ‘To look for the canals with a large instrument in poor air is like trying to read a page of fine print kept dancing before one's eyes,’ Lowell remarked.
“He stared at Mars for hours on end, waiting for rare moments when the image stabilized. During these flashes of clarity–mere fractions of a second–he glimpsed faint threads that stretched across the bright surface. At first, he doubted his eyes. ‘These sudden revelation peeps may or may not be truth,’ he inscribed in his logbook. Yet the visions returned, still tantalizingly brief. ‘Not sufficient time to make sure of suspected canals.’ Eventually, Lowell convinced himself that what he saw was real. ‘The number of canals increases encouragingly,’ he wrote his mother in September.
“By early November, he was seeing the lines ‘in profusion,’ and his sketches now depicted Mars as though a gargantuan spider had spun its silk upon the surface. ‘It looks as if it had been cobwebbed all over.’ Then, one late autumn's early twilight, on an evening so still that the smoke from Flagstaff's chimneys rose straight upward and a hush fell over the land, Lowell pointed his telescope at Mars and nearly gasped. Where he had previously seen single lines etched upon the planet, he now saw them twinned, like railway tracks across the western plains. Lowell fired a telegram to the press: ‘The canals of Mars have begun to double.’
"NOW YOU SEE THAT the more one observes Mars the more the number of strange and inexplicable matters increases,’ the Italian who had first mapped the canals wrote a fellow astronomer around this time. Schiaparelli remained optimistic that scientists would eventually solve the mystery of Mars, but it seemed unlikely that he would be the one to do so. That summer, the Brooklyn science journalist Garrett P. Serviss, having already traveled to the moon with American theater audiences, was touring Europe to collect material for future lectures. He stopped in Milan, and when he arrived at the Brera Observatory to meet Schiaparelli, Serviss noted that this eminent scientist who had seen so far had now grown so nearsighted that he had to hold his guest's calling card five inches from his face. The colorblind astronomer was gradually going blind. It would be left to others to pick up Schiaparelli's mantle.
“Elsewhere in Europe, the fabric of society continued to fray. Anarchists detonated more bombs–in Paris, London, and Barcelona–while in Lyon, a young revolutionary rushed the carriage of French president Sadi Carnot and plunged a dagger into his abdomen. (The fatal attack was revenge for the guillotining of the assassin's comrades.) In the United States, the lingering depression of 1893 convulsed the country with labor unrest. Populist businessman Jacob Coxey marched a ragtag band of the unemployed from Ohio to Washington, D.C., to demand federal jobs, his ‘tramp army’ a seeming harbinger of class war. The shrewd union leader Eugene V. Debs, later a perennial Socialist Party candidate for president, then organized a massive rail strike that stranded passengers and freight, choking the very lifeblood of civilization until armed troops quelled the uprising. It all seemed further evidence of society's unspooling. ‘Our own little planet is proving itself, in these latter years of the nineteenth century, capable of furnishing to its inhabitants quite as much excitement as is good for them, without any assistance from Mars,’ a Rochester, New York, paper quipped. ‘Now what with ... militant anarchy, Coxeyism, Debsism, and other portents, weak-minded people who are always on the look-out for the end of the world are under quite sufficient strain already.’
“Yet, in all seriousness, a connection existed between the science of astronomy and the public's end-of-the-century despair. Only a few generations earlier, it had been easy to believe that Earth was a hallowed world at the center of the universe with a caretaker God overseeing it all. Scientists had now shown that ours was an unexceptional planet around an ordinary sun, merely one star out of millions, and that objective laws and processes explained the workings of nature. People felt unmoored–alienated–and grasped at existential questions: the meaning of life, what happens when we die. Without God, who could provide the answers?
"Nothing, in truth, so much exalts our sense-perception, and at the same time admonishes and humiliates it, as the manifestations of astronomy,’ wrote the British author Sir Edwin Arnold. ‘We have enlarged enormously our conceptions of the universe, but apparently forgotten to magnify our beliefs." Arnold contended that where scientists had destroyed the old tenets of religion, it was now up to them to help build a new spiritual framework. ‘The best thing that could happen for mankind would be if a great astronomer had been born a poet or a great poet should become an astronomer,’ he concluded, ‘for we sadly need newer and nobler ideas in the chief of sciences.’
“Percival Lowell had always loved language, and, like many in his [high] social class, he dabbled in poetry. As a child, when his toy boat sank in a puddle of snowmelt, he fashioned an ode to the shipwrecked vessel in Latin verse. In Japan, he wrote poems praising the beauty of cherry blossoms and the majesty of Mount Fuji, although his expatriate friends advised that he stick to prose. Now in Flagstaff, studying Mars, he opened a notebook and began to compose:
"A sister planet, whose sister face
Complete in all its rounded grace
Mirrors what we our Earth might see
Could we once above it rise
To behold it in its entity
Sailing along through the pathless skies. "
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