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Volume 2321

MARS FEVER I
MARS INVADES EARTH

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"Mars had held an unshakable grip on the human imagination for thousands of years. As ancient astronomers watched the stars sweep majestically across the black dome of the sky, they focused their attention on a strange reddish object that didn't seem to follow the laws of the heavens. Nearly all the stars seemed to move along the same arc, but Mars was one of only a handful of stars that did not follow the proper trajectory. The Greeks called these objects planetes, meaning 'wanderers.'" ~ Uncovering the Secrets of the Red Planet, Mars ~ National Geographic

The "wanderer" with the most complicated motion would regularly reverse course, moving backwards through the zodiac. This complicated motion along with its bloody colour prompted the Romans to name it Mars after their god of war.

Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)  declared in On the Revolutions of the Celetial Spheres,  that the sun, not the Earth, was the centre of the universe.     .

Scenographia: Systematis Copernicani Astrological Chart - 1543 Copernicus showed that the motions of the celestial bodies  more easily could be understood if the Earth revolved around the sun.

In 140 A.D. Claudius Ptolemy, a scholar from Alexandria, Egypt,  expanded Eudoxus's theory of the planets that put  Earth at the centre of the solar system.  Although incorrect, Ptolemy's theory survived another 1,500 years.

Johannes Kepler's breakthroughs  in understanding and testing  the principles of planetary laws  laid the foundation for modern physics.

Tycho Brahe established Europe's finest observatory  on the island of Hven in the late 16th century  which revolutionized astronomy. Brahe invented the wall quadrant which enabled him to take precise measurements of the positions of celestial bodies.

Early astronomers described and recorded  what they saw in the heavens  with great accuracy. .

Galileo, the greatest of the early astronomers,  observed the heavens and presented many theories  in an attempt to explain the wonders he saw.

Giovanni Schiaparelli  (1835-1910) Italian astronomer

Percival Lowell's telescope In his 1896 book, Mars as the Abode of Life,  he suggested that Schiaparelli's canali  were a pattern of crisscrossing canals with "oases" at their intersections --  probably an irrigation network.  This theory fired the imaginations of  many future SF fans and writers.

Percival Lowell observes Mars at  his Flagstaff, Arizona observatory.  His unyielding adherence to the idea of Martian canals and intelligent life stoked public enthusiasm for its exploration  but led other astronomers to ostracize him.

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Another young reader who fell under Lowell's spell was Hugo Gernsback (see the ERB/Gernsback Connection ERBzine 1462 . . .) who went on to create a string of science invention and SF magazines such as Amazing Stories. One of his major illustrators was Frank Paul.

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The possibility of life on the red planet has been discussed for ages.
Richard Proctor (1837-1888), wrote in his popular Other Worlds Than Ours (1870)
that the planet had seas and the oceans and was a miniature Earth. (Proctor Obituary)

The preeminent French astronomer Camille Flammarion (1842-1925) popularized astronomy and cosmology, and discussed the physiological properties of extra-terrestrial life in his ground-breaking La Pluralité des Mondes Habités (The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds) (1862), Les Habitants de l'Autre Monde (The Inhabitants of Other Worlds) (1862), Les Mondes Imaginaires et les Mondes Réels (Imaginary and RealWorlds) (1864), and finally, Les Terres du Ciel (Lands in the Sky) (1884). The works of Flammarion had an immense infuence on the public, and the author remained convinced that there was life on Mars until his passing.

Camille Flammarion ~ Canals of Mars and Illustrations of Martians from His Books

Speculation has cooled over the last century since the development of improved telescopic observations. Today much of this type of excitement and speculation has been transferred to a curiosity about UFOs.

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The reason for all this excitement over Mars is understandable. Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910), an Italian astronomer of the observatory of Brera, had asserted in 1877 to have seen canals on Mars. He believed that at least some of these canals must have been constructed by intelligent creatures. He speculated that they were colossal waterworks built by the inhabitants of the planet to carry meltwater from the polar ice caps to their cities, factories and irrigable land.  Flammarion rejected the idea that the canals could simply be cracks in the ice or faults opened from the cooling of the planet since nature could never trace such straight lines on a globe. They could only be created by a species whose intelligence and and technology would be more advanced than ours.

PORTRAIT OF SCHIAPARELLI And MAP OF HIS FIRST OBSERVATIONS


 

THE SECOND DEFINITIVE MARS MAP BY SCHIAPARELLI.
WITH AN IMPROVEMENT ON HIS OBSERVATIONS FROM 1877 AND 1888

 

FOG-COVERED CANAL BY ©CHESLEY BONESTELL and A CANAL WITH VEGETATION BY DAVID HARDY©

Percival Lowell's telescope In his 1896 book, Mars as the Abode of Life,  he suggested that Schiaparelli's canali  were a pattern of crisscrossing canals with "oases" at their intersections --  probably an irrigation network.  This theory fired the imaginations of  many future SF fans and writers.

Percival Lowell observes Mars at  his Flagstaff, Arizona observatory.  His unyielding adherence to the idea of Martian canals and intelligent life stoked public enthusiasm for its exploration  but led other astronomers to ostracize him.

Some hypotheses tried to explain the "channels" in other bizarre ways. Elihu Thompson, famous electrotechnical investigator, thought that they were traces of the passage of animals.  He suggested that without wide mountains or rivers to hinder their march during their annual migrations the animals could move in straight lines. This gradually established of paths along which vegetation had been formed, while the rest of the planet is remained desert (Beloved Scientist - Elihu Thompson: To Guiding Spirit of the Electrical Age by David Or Woodbury 1944).

Others suggested that Mars was a planet totally covered from the water and that the Mars ground seen through telescopes was really composed of enormous floating masses of algae. The channels would have been gaps in these masses caused by marine currents, through which the true surface of the planet could be seen at the bottom of the ocean.

Lowell, and later H.G. Wells, agreed that the Martians could be quite different from us physically. Lowell in his book, Mars, of 1895 suggested that to speak about Mars inhabitants does not mean to say Martian men. Under different physical conditions life would evolve in ways we have no way of conceiving.  Lowell carried on this argument in two later volumes, Mars and its Canals in 1907 and Mars as the Abode of Life in 1908.

Lowell 437 channels, some as long as 1500 km. He was convinced that the Martians were industrious and benign and very intelligent to have created such a massive global project.

THE CANALS OF MARS BY A GERMAN ARTIST circa 1900

MARS AS VISIONED BY LUCIEN RUDAUX

 

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.  ~ H. G. WELLS ~ THE WAR OFTHE WORLDS
 

In the article "The Things that Live on Mars," in the March 1908 Cosmopolitan Magazine, H. G. Wells tried by scientific reasoning to predict how Martians might look.

Through different evolutionary processes he felt that creatures on Mars would be very different from creatures on earth -- in shape, functions, structure and behaviors to the extent that they would be fantastically bizarre. Because of their high intelligence, they would likely have great brains with enormous skulls. They would be at least twice the mass of humans and would probably be covered with plumage or fur. As for the Martian fauna there would probably be no flies, sparrows, dogs or cats but it is possible that there would be insect life and there may be some form of  aquatic creatures.

Martian spacecraft attack Earth in H.G. Wells ' The War of the Worlds.  The Martian invaders shower terror on Victorian England  with weapons of mass destruction.  Chance, not human resourcefulness,  ultimately saves the planet.

H.G. Wells's Martian Invaders "Across the gulf of space  minds that are to our minds  as ours are to the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes . . ."     ..

Warwick Goble illustration  from the first serialization of  The War of the Worlds in Pearson's Magazine - 1898.

W.R. Leigh illustrations for  "The Things That Live on Mars" as they appeared in the Midwinter  1908 issue of Cosmopolitan.

Reprinted in the article  "Is Mars Inhabited?"  by Prof. David Todd  and H. G. Wells.

Orson Welles performing his radio adaptation of  The War of the Worlds in the form of a live news account. The program triggered panic in listeners who believed the drama to be real.

Poster from the 1953 Paramount movie. .