We’re talking today with David Baron, author of “The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America,” who will be at this year’s National Book Festival on Sept. 6. It’s about the public fascination with what looked to be the very real possibility of life of Mars. The main cultural artifact of this belief might be H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel, “The War of the Worlds,” which imagined hostile Martians invading Earth in spectacular fashion. But as Baron writes, most of the views were utopian, picturing Martians as a far advanced, heroic people. He researched part of the book while holding the 2020-2021 Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation, part of the John W. Kluge Center.
This conversation has been edited for space and clarity.
Timeless: The whole fascination with Mars in this era started in the late 1870s. Tell us about that.
David Baron: Yes. In 1877, a year when Mars came especially close to Earth, an Italian astronomer named Giovanni Schiaparelli in Milan decided he was going to make a new map of Mars. Night after night, he was studying the planet through his telescope. Mars turns on its axis about once every 24 hours like Earth, so he could see features come into and rotate out of view. It looked as if Mars had oceans and continents like the Earth. But Schiaparelli noticed what he thought were really thin straight lines that crisscrossed the planet. He assumed they were waterways, like the English channel. He called them “canali,” which in Italian means channels, but it was mistranslated into English as canals. It stuck.
Timeless: The idea of intelligent life and canals on Mars gained steam and by the 1890s, the hero of the book, Percival Lowell, an extremely wealthy, very prominent Bostonian, goes all in on astronomy and Mars.
Baron: Right, Lowell was well-educated, incredibly smart, articulate, famous. His family founded the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, and they were very much involved in Harvard. They were instrumental in creating the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For years, Percival, the wealthy son, was a roving anthropologist in Japan and Korea. He wrote books and gave lectures. But in 1892, there was a sort of Mars boom, when some astronomers thought they saw lights and triangles on Mars. This got a lot of attention in newspapers. It was also the era of the gentleman astronomer, and Lowell, who had become fascinated with this, took it to an entirely new level with his wealth. He created the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1894, specifically to study Mars. He was convinced that there was life on Mars, and he was going to make a name for himself as the man who proved that Martians existed.
Timeless: Not everybody agreed with the life on Mars idea, but I was surprised at how many serious people did. Alexander Graham Bell thought there was intelligent life there. And then Nikola Tesla got involved in dramatic fashion.
Baron: Tesla was a genius. Tesla was incredibly well known. Tesla was highly respected. And he, after working for so long on the transmission of electricity with wires, got interested in the idea of electrical transmission without wires — wireless. In other words, radio, which is what Guglielmo Marconi was working on, too. In 1899, Tesla went out to Colorado and created an experimental laboratory. He spent the better part of a year studying electrical transmission through the atmosphere and the earth. Again, this is before radio really existed. And one night he was alone in the laboratory, and he started to hear this kind of triplet of clicks. He would hear, click, click, click … click, click, click, repeating like that. He convinced himself it was the Martians. He waited until New Year’s Eve, at the beginning of 1901, and then he announced what he had heard. That just completely took off in the press. It really propelled the Mars mania to new heights.
Timeless: This finally all peaks around 1907 or so.
Baron: Lowell took photographs of Mars through his telescope. They were tiny, about a quarter of an inch, the size of a shirt button, and they were very grainy. You could see that there were features that would come in and out of view as the planet rotated, but he claimed you could actually see the canals, too. Over time, he got slightly better photographs and he convinced himself, and he convinced the public, that they really did prove that the canals were there. By 1907, what started out as a theory that was embraced by the tabloid press was now being taken very seriously by the conservative press. The New York Times was publishing very serious articles about the Martians. The Wall Street Journal said that the biggest news of 1907 was the proof of intelligent life on Mars.
Timeless: And this really resonated all across the culture.
Baron: Oh, yes. The idea of Martians had started out as a fun thing. There were Martians in vaudeville acts and Martians in Tin Pan Alley songs. But by 1908, the Martians were infiltrating religion. You had pastors sermonizing about the Martians as superior beings and what they might be able to teach us. And there was this wonderful article that ran in a number of newspapers, a list of the questions that people thought Martians might be able to answer. They weren’t practical, they were things like, “What is the meaning of life? How can we prevent human suffering? Where does the soul go when we die?” There was this real longing for the Martians, I think, to be a kind of guardian angel, a stand-in for God when religion has been undermined by so much science. Lowell, with his science, had given people back a new kind of faith in superior beings that might be able to look after us in a lonely universe.
Timeless: And then … it all went wrong. There weren’t canals, and there weren’t Martians.
Baron: In 1909, Mars again came particularly close to Earth, and astronomers trained their better telescopes on it. There was a one-time believer in canals, a prominent astronomer in France named Eugene-Michel Antoniadi, who, on one particularly perfect night of viewing when the air over Paris was absolutely still, saw Mars with perfect clarity. He saw that what he had thought was a canal was just sort of a knotted shape on the landscape, or maybe just some gentle shading. It wasn’t a straight line. Antoniadi convinced himself that the whole thing had been an illusion, and he took it upon himself to bring Lowell down. Though he lived in France, he was head of the Mars section of the British Astronomical Association. From that platform, he wrote to astronomers all over the world, he wrote for newspapers and wrote for magazines, that the whole thing was an illusion.
Timeless: Things did not go well for our hero.
Baron: Lowell would never hear of it. But by then there were other astronomers who had better photographs. And so by 1910, 1911, the astronomical community had pretty well decided that Lowell was wrong. But Lowell continued to promote the idea. He said he saw more and more canals. He would go out on the road and give speeches portraying himself as this misunderstood genius. I think it’s safe to say that Lowell really was delusional at that point. He died in 1916 of a brain hemorrhage, still convinced that the Martian civilization existed.
Timeless: And so what is his legacy today, do you think?
Baron: He gave the public what they loved, which was the idea of a civilization next door. That excitement was real. It was Lowell’s Martians, which never existed, that really spurred what we know today as modern science fiction. And it was more than that. It helped launch the Space Age itself because the early rocket scientists, including Robert H. Goddard, the father of American rocketry, was very explicit that it was as a boy reading “War of the Worlds” that inspired him to think, “Well, gosh, could we actually find a way to go to Mars?” Wernher von Braun first built rockets for the Nazis, but then came to the U.S. and built rockets for NASA. He grew up reading fiction based on Lowell’s Mars that got him excited about the idea of space travel. So, the early rocket scientists were inspired by him, too.