David Baron’s The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America (Liverlight/Norton) is a thoroughly researched account of late 19th and early 20th-century fascination with the potential for intelligent life on Mars. The book focuses primarily on the life of Percival Lowell, a member of the wealthy and influential Boston family, and his obsession with proving the existence of an advanced civilization on Mars.
Baron delves into the broader story, too, recounting many fascinating and, at times, humorous tales of Mars mania, dubious science, and hucksterism that surround the public’s fascination with the idea of life on the red planet. Notable figures like Alexander Graham Bell and Nikola Tesla weighed in on the matter, each offering support for the idea that Mars was home to a civilization that wanted to communicate with Earthlings. Late 19th-century newspapers, not beholden to anything we might call journalistic standards, hyped the dubious findings with screaming front-page headlines.
Lowell, who had little education in science, became convinced that Mars was home to a race of intelligent beings due to the perception that there were “canals” on its surface. The idea that Mars had canals was based on questionable interpretations of photos of the planet’s surface made with the era’s optical telescopes. He invested large amounts of his own money into the effort, doing a great deal to publicize his ideas—and receiving a mix of public appreciation and brutal criticism from the real astronomical scientists of the day.
Baron, an author, journalist, and former science correspondent for NPR, chronicles the worldwide debate between the “canalists” and “anti-canalists” with many colorful anecdotes. At a distance of 150 years, the whole ruckus seems a bit silly. Did serious people really believe that there was life on another planet based on a few blurry sketches? Yes, it seems they did, and the reasons for it are revealing, in historical terms, but also as a mirror to our own pseudoscientific moment.
While Baron notes that humans had been contemplating the existence of life off of Earth for millennia, the Mars phenomenon was driven, in part, by 19th-century racial paradigms. Lowell and his peers lived at a time when intellectuals spoke authoritatively about African “savages” and more “advanced” European civilizations. A civilization in outer space would likely be a “higher” level, in racial terms. The quest for life on Mars was a drive, in part, to find the next level “up” in the civilization scale.
The book also explores the divide between pure science, such as it was in the 19th century, and the notion that science should be fueled by the imagination. For someone like Lowell, the answer was obvious: Imagination should drive scientific processes. The problem, not surprisingly, is that Lowell used less than rigorous scientific methods to prove what his imagination told him to be true. This didn’t go well for him. Vague speculations turned into failed attempts at persuasive arguments, and he ended up discredited. It was not all for nought, though. The planet Pluto was named after him, though, with the letters “PL” honoring his legacy. The Lowell Observatory in Arizona, which he founded, still exists today.
The Martians, like many books that showcase the oddities of earlier eras, offers the seductive temptation to sneer and pass judgment on the seemingly ridiculous acts of people who should have known better. If one is paying attention to the story, however, it would be wise to avoid this smug tut-tutting. The mania that Baron is describing is very much still with us, just dressed up in slightly more respectable garb.
Right now, we have influential billionaires, the modern equivalents of the Cabots and the Lowells, pouring money into Mars exploration—feeding an eager public fantasies of settling on the red planet. More broadly, the battle between real science and pseudoscience has not gone away. Indeed, it rages more fiercely than ever, with bitter arguments over everything from vaccines to global warming pitting actual data-driven research against “experts” whose “gut” tells them what’s “really going on.” Public opinion surveys tell us who is winning, and the results are not encouraging.
The Martians is a well-written and well-researched historical book that’s also fun to read. It’s engaging, full of offbeat stories that capture a subject that lives on today.