The Day We Found the Universe - Marcia Bartusiak [41]
My Regards to the Squashes
Roman god. Bringer of War. Fourth planet from the Sun. Astronomers eager to solve the spiral nebulae dilemma had Mars, strangely enough, to thank for a further step toward an answer—at least in a roundabout way.
The red planet, with its vivid ruby luster, has fascinated stargazers for millennia, but interest grew even more intense after the invention of the telescope. With the extra magnification astronomers could at last discern markings on the surface of Mars. Bright patches around its poles, similar in appearance to our own planet's arctic and antarctic regions, were seen to wax and wane with the Martian seasons. So Earthlike was this behavior that by 1784 William Herschel was reporting that Mars “is not without a considerable atmosphere … so that its inhabitants probably enjoy a situation in many respects similar to ours.”
Scrutiny of Mars was particularly favorable in the fall of 1877, when Earth and Mars were at their closest, approaching in their orbits to within thirty-five million miles of each other. The superb viewing conditions allowed the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli to catch sight of numerous dark streaks crossing Mars's reddish ochre regions, then known as “continents.” In his native language, he called these thin shadowy bands canali, or “channels,” which many figured arose from natural geographical processes.
But Schiaparelli's term was translated inaccurately, a gaffe that encouraged many fanciful conjectures. The most controversial, by far, was the assumption that the “canals” were irrigation works built by advanced beings, who were directing scarce resources over the surface of their planet for cultivation. “Considerable variations observed in the network of waterways,” wrote French astronomer Camille Flammarion in 1892, “testify that this planet is the seat of an energetic vitality… There might at the same moment be thunderstorms, volcanoes, tempests, social upheavals and all kinds of struggle for life.” No one championed this idea more avidly than Percival Lowell, a wealthy businessman whose crusade generated a Mars mania among the public, so much so that the Wall Street Journal in 1907 reported that evidence for the existence of Martian folk surpassed that year's financial panic as the news story of the year.
Percival Lowell (Lowell Observatory Archives)
Lowell, the oldest of five children, came from a well-established New England family. He was one of the Boston Brahmins, upper-crust Bostonians who had made their fortunes creating the American cotton industry. A few years after graduating from Harvard in 1876, Lowell began to travel extensively, especially to the Far East, which led to his writing several well-received books on the region and its religions. By the 1890s, though, restless and searching for individual expression, he renewed a childhood interest in astronomy. “After lying dormant for many years,” recalled his brother, “it blazed forth again as the dominant one in his life.” Independently wealthy, Lowell decided to establish a private observatory atop a pine-forested mesa nestled against the small village of Flagstaff, Arizona (then still a territory of the United States). His initial aim was to observe the particularly close approaches of Mars occurring in 1894 and 1896. Later, the entire solar system became his celestial playground. He was taking to heart his family's motto—occasionem cognosce, “seize your opportunity.” It was a daring venture for an amateur astronomer with no professional experience, especially since he found himself competing with the new and larger astronomical outposts then being built by universities and research institutions. But in this rivalry, Lowell became the outsider, dedicating his observatory to the pursuit of questions that interested him and him alone. Given his obsession with the red planet, the high perch on which the observatory rested, 7,250 feet above sea level, was soon