It is tempting, from the air-conditioned remove of the twenty-first century, to designate Percival Lowell one of the great buffoons in American history. He imagined that he spied an advanced civilization on Mars, spent a fortune to prove it, constructed lavish monuments to his lunacy (martiacy?), and browbeat scientists or journalists who questioned him, all the while cramming fistfuls of cream peppermints into his mouth. But Mars has a way of making us all buffoons. Although Venus is commonly referred to as Earth’s “twin planet” because of its similar size and composition, it’s our other orbital neighbor that has consistently reflected our most humiliating vanities, hypocrisies, and fantasies. Lowell, on some level, understood this, as this poem suggests (besides being a failed astronomer, a failed philanthropist, and a failed diplomat, he was also a failed poet):
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.
That sad “entity”…when “entirety” lay just within reach.
The tragedy of Percival Lowell is that he did possess a unique, world-changing talent—just not the one he desired.
It is not easy to make a pretentious blowhard wastrel like Lowell a sympathetic figure, but David Baron manages it admirably in The Martians, his convivial and rigorously researched history of the first Martian craze. Baron’s narrative draws in a cotillion of writers, scientists, and public figures obsessed with visions of Martian society—among them H.G. Wells, Nikola Tesla, and Mabel Loomis Todd—and more broadly the cultural and political era that informed those visions. But The Martians is fundamentally a portrait of the man who turned Mars into the night sky’s red Rorschach blot.
Drawing from Lowell’s letters, notes, and journal entries and retracing his journeys around the world, Baron reconstructs his subject’s inner life. He begins at the Harvard graduation of 1876, where Percival, despite having been tapped to deliver a commencement speech, was the least impressive Lowell in Harvard Yard. He was a sixth-generation Harvardian. His grandfather John Amory Lowell (’15) was a fellow of Harvard College for forty years. Percival’s father, Augustus Lowell (’50), who regularly exhorted his sons to achieve something “of real significance,” was the treasurer of the Harvard Alumni Association. The association’s president was Percival’s cousin James Russell Lowell (’38), a Harvard professor of languages and, on the side, the founding editor of The Atlantic Monthly. Lowells had been elected as federal judges and representatives since the Constitutional Convention, served as majors and generals in the Continental and Union Armies, spoken out forcefully in support of the abolition movement, led America’s industrial revolution, presided over the rise of the cotton, textile, and modern shipping industries, and written celebrated novels and poems. Even Percival’s younger brother, Abbott Lawrence, a year his junior, was nipping at his heels; he would later become Harvard’s president. It is not surprising that young Percival hated everyone.
“I have…become decidedly misanthropic,” he wrote after graduation, having received a sinecure in his grandfather’s office, “and, with the exception of a few friends, should not feel many pangs at migrating to another planet.”
He migrated first to East Asia, the closest thing to another planet that he could imagine—a land blissfully ignorant of Lowells. Percival resurfaced from time to time, initially as a member of the first Korean diplomatic mission to the US and later as the author of a series of travelogues that were excerpted and reviewed respectfully in his uncle’s Atlantic for their sympathetic depictions of “an alien race.” In Chosön, the Land of the Morning Calm, for example, he wrote:
I ask you to go with me to a land whose life for ages has been a mystery,—a land which from time unknown has kept aloof, apart…. Her people have been born, have lived, have died, oblivious to all that was passing around them. They might have been denizens of another planet for aught they knew of the history of this.
“Another planet” was a recurring motif in his letters and essays, so his subconscious, at least, was primed when he learned of a major discovery by a Milanese astronomer. Giovanni Schiaparelli, whom Baron portrays as kindly, well intentioned, doddering, and purblind, had come to the astonishing conclusion that the surface of Mars was grooved. The lines he observed and sketched in obsessively detailed maps were mostly straight and narrow. They extended between larger masses of darkness that were widely assumed to be oceans. Schiaparelli concluded that his “delicate stripes,” as Baron describes them, were waterways or channels (canali). Over time he noticed ever more channels, often in parallel tracks. This became a pattern: the more people stared at Mars, the more they saw.
As an astronomical observation, Schiaparelli’s canali would have been significant enough—the first evidence of a Martian hydrological system. But upon reaching the English-language press, they were exalted by an error of translation. Schiaparelli hadn’t discovered water channels. He had discovered canals. Channels formed naturally. Canals were constructed.
Popular attention leaped past the existence of the canals to speculate on the identity of their engineers. “What is going on in Mars?” asked The New York Herald. Increasingly journalists suggested that the canals were not merely infrastructure but ideograms meant to convey messages to Earthlings. Schiaparelli, and most serious astronomers, did not take such speculation seriously. But Lowell did.
When, at a dinner party in Boston, a junior Harvard astronomer spoke of his fascination with Mars, Lowell pounced. He offered a gigantic donation to support the construction of an observatory at high elevation in the desert West, where Mars could be viewed with exceptional clarity. The only condition was that Lowell direct the operation. He hired the astronomer and an assistant away from Harvard, purchased the largest telescope that money could buy, and built an elevated, domed platform in Flagstaff, Arizona. He named it the Lowell Observatory.
In retrospect it seems safe to say that the scientists who abandoned their Harvard careers to join Lowell in Flagstaff and operate his state-of-the-art facility were not entirely dispassionate observers, free to form unbiased interpretations of what they saw through his fancy telescope. Well before the observatory opened, their patron made his expectations clear.
“There is strong reason to believe that we are on the eve of a pretty definite discovery,” Lowell said in May 1894, during a lecture he gave in Boston about the canals. “The most self-evident explanation from the markings themselves is probably the true one; namely, that in them we are looking upon the result of the work of some sort of intelligent beings.”
Yet once in Flagstaff, even with the help of his high-powered telescope, Lowell and his team struggled to obtain a clear view of Mars. Seen from Earth, the planet wobbles and is blurry, the result, as Baron writes, of viewing the heavens “from the bottom of an ocean of air.” To Lowell’s frustration, the new telescope could not overcome the atmospheric interference, and like every astronomer before him except Schiaparelli, he failed to make out any canals at all. Obtaining a vivid image of the planet, he complained, was “like trying to read a page of fine print kept dancing before one’s eyes.”
Still he persisted, staring for hours through the eyepiece, awaiting the rare moments in which the view of the Martian surface appeared to stabilize, at which point he would frantically sketch what he had seen. To reconstruct Lowell’s delirium, Baron traveled to Flagstaff, where Lowell’s telescope remains inside the observatory that, while altered, retains his name. Baron waits like his subject, staring with intense concentration through the eyepiece at the jiggling planet. “What goes through one’s mind in a setting like this?” he asks. “It seemed ideal for the inducement of dreamlike visions.”
Dreamlike visions, in any case, are what began to afflict Lowell. “Suspicions of canals,” he wrote, during his first weeks in Arizona. After three months of squinting, “the number of canals increases encouragingly.” Two more months later he began seeing lines “in profusion”; he compared the surface of Mars to a spiderweb. In late November he alerted the national press.
Delusion led to assumption led to extrapolation led to elaboration and back again. The canals, Lowell concluded, were an ingenious planetwide irrigation system that funneled water from Mars’s ice-capped poles to desert oases blooming with rich vegetation. Around these oases, vast cities had formed. Scientific observations gave way to moral judgments. “The first thing that is forced on us in conclusion,” wrote Lowell, “is the necessarily intelligent and non-bellicose character of the community.” Such complex industrial planning, performed efficiently at planetary scale, required a civilization far more harmonious than our own. It had taken Earthlings a decade to dredge the measly Suez Canal, but the Martians unveiled new transcontinental canals all the time. They evidently had agreed to put aside their differences and work together to transform their desert world into a paradise of their own design.
When The Atlantic published Lowell’s lecture about his findings, the issue sold out on newsstands; additional lectures ran the next three months. He achieved national celebrity, enjoying profiles that extolled his wealth and brilliance. (The Boston Sunday Globe: “He is a scholar by instinct, and an astronomer by choice. He is rich and a bachelor, and he spends money without stint in carrying out his chosen work.”) After great effort and even greater expenditure, Lowell had fulfilled his prophecy about life on Mars. More impressively, he had fulfilled his familial fate. As the leading authority on a matter of pressing global significance (hailed by The New York Times as “the great astronomer who is now held to be the specialist on Mars—the Martian expert, as it were”), he had at last become worthy of the Lowell name.
He chased atmospheric clarity in the hope of securing further details of Martian society. He bankrolled expeditions to the Sahara and the Andes, though he did not always attend himself, as he struggled to stay awake during nighttime viewings. Often he remained at his Flagstaff estate, which he called his “Baronial Mansion,” ordering Roquefort cheese and Mumm’s Extra Dry Champagne from Los Angeles and claret and cigars from Boston. He did tour Europe on occasion, making pilgrimages to Schiaparelli and the other man most responsible for speculation about life on Mars, the French scientist, philosopher, and novelist Camille Flammarion. Lowell came to pay homage but couldn’t help engaging in some friendly canal-measuring contests. “You have only 79 on your map,” he told Flammarion. “We have 183. That’s 104 new ones,” he added helpfully.
The canals continued to proliferate, and Lowell’s maps grew increasingly detailed, labeled with names drawn from ancient mythology. When he observed that the canals darkened and faded over time, Lowell attributed the phenomenon to the Martians’ engineering schemes and deduced sophisticated seasonal patterns in the draining of the polar reservoirs. He even calculated the average speed of water flowing through the canals: 2.1 miles per hour. “The mental ear,” he wrote, “detects the sound of water percolating down the latitudes.”
Credulous and adulatory headlines accompanied each new discovery. In 1906 The New York Times Magazine ran a full-page feature about Lowell bearing the unequivocal title “There Is Life on the Planet Mars.” Some scientists were taken in, particularly those who had allowed themselves to dream of Martian encampments. “I suspected them myself,” Schiaparelli told Lowell, “but could never see them well enough to make sure.”
During these fevered years of national celebrity, a growing number of astronomers not employed by Lowell began to question his conclusions. His most persistent antagonist was Edward Holden, the director of the Lick Observatory in California, who doubted Lowell’s entire premise: “Nearly every living astronomer will agree with me in saying, as I do, that there is no reasonable probability whatever of any such settlement.” While irritating—Lowell’s consoling mother compared Holden to a fly—the attacks, which tended to appear in academic journals and not major newspapers, only inspired him to more ambitious declarations.
Some indication that Lowell’s methods might be flawed came relatively early, when he turned his telescope to Venus and saw…more canals. “I have no hesitation in saying that such markings as are shown by Mr. Lowell [do] not exist on Venus,” said Holden. “They are illusions.” The canals appeared suspiciously to correspond to the network of blood vessels in the human retina—as if in his furious search Lowell had strained his eyes and imposed himself on the planets that obsessed him.
The Venus episode precipitated one of the several psychological breaks that beset him throughout his life. (Baron supposes the contemporary diagnosis would be bipolar disorder.) But after a couple of years recovering at seaside resorts in Bermuda and on the French Riviera, Lowell returned to Flagstaff, fired a junior staffer who had been skeptical of his findings, bought himself a professorship at MIT (on whose board his father had sat), and resumed his life’s work. Before long he had regained his status as the country’s most famous and beloved astronomer.
A more dangerous threat was emerging, however: modern photography. For a time Lowell believed that it would grant him final vindication of his theories. He ordered an assistant, Carl Otto Lampland, to experiment with filters and emulsions to capture the planet between wobbles. “We must secure some canals to confound the sceptics,” he wrote Lampland, in what was less a statement than an order. Finally Lampland presented him with a series of dim photographs showing a dark blotch, approximately the shape of the Indian subcontinent, playing across Mars’s ghostly pale surface. Lowell dispatched a telegram to the press declaring victory: “To-day we can state as positive and final that there are canals on Mars—because the photographs say so, and a photographic negative is nothing if not truthful.”
Lowell was right about the power of photography, at least: Lampland’s smudgy photographs contributed to his undoing. The press attention they received, which included validations from the most august editorial boards in the nation, eventually stimulated the scientific establishment to take decisive public action. The Astronomical and Astrophysical Society of America, led by the director of the Harvard Observatory whose staff Lowell had poached, published a statement denouncing the canal theory. Lowell was soon betrayed by his closest friends and collaborators, who expressed their skepticism about his work to reporters. Even Flammarion and Schiaparelli (who by now was too blind to see anything through a telescope) distanced themselves from his theories in a twilight effort to rehabilitate their own. By the end of 1910 the world had moved on from the canals, and from Lowell.
He was fifty-five years old and had spent the past sixteen years of his life studying Mars. He lived only another six, which he spent furiously drawing his maps of canals in his Flagstaff mansion and raving to anybody who would listen to him that he had “absolute proof” of Martian life. He referred to himself as the “Martian ambassador” and mistook the patronizing decorousness of professional astronomers for intimidated respect. “In psychiatric terms,” writes Baron, “Lowell was cycling between mania and depression.”
In a final series of lectures, speaking before college and high school students, he bemoaned the plight of misunderstood genius. “In the end,” he said, “the truth will prevail and though you may never live to see it, your work will be recognized after you are gone.” He was gone a few weeks later, dead of an aneurysm at sixty-one.
But his work does live on. The institutions that still bear his name emphasize one of his other astronomical predictions, made in the year before his death: that he had determined the general location of a ninth planet in our solar system. More than a decade later, in 1930, a young astronomer at Lowell Observatory discovered Pluto and gave Lowell credit for setting the search in motion. Pluto, however, has since been demoted to a dwarf planet, forcing his ghost to submit to yet another debunking.
Yet Baron, following the line of some of the more generous obituaries published at the time of Lowell’s death, makes the case that his subject deserves credit for a more profound contribution. It was Lowell, after all, who made Americans dream of a future on Mars. “His work is a great and lasting one,” wrote the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “for it has opened amazing fields of speculation, and has led the human imagination to soar to distances seldom before attained.” More precisely, Lowell gave rise to one of the more durable forms of modern utopian thought: Mars as heaven.
His writings fixed the pattern, with their imaginings of a superior civilization bound by principles of equality, respect for the natural world, and engineering mastery. The Martians, Baron writes, “were us, only better—wiser, more peaceful, more moral.” This interpretation held regardless of one’s ideological orientation. Capitalists marveled at the Martians’ industry and efficiency. Socialists looked to Mars and saw a workers’ utopia; the Russian novelist Aleksandr Bogdanov published a pair of novels—Red Star (1908) and Engineer Menni (1913)—about a comrade who, on a tour of the planet, learns that all Martians speak a single language, wear the same clothes, and enjoy economic abundance. Priests, meanwhile, incorporated Lowell’s visions into sermons that celebrated Mars as a Christian paradise.
In the decades that followed, new generations of popular novelists—Edgar Rice Burroughs, Arthur C. Clarke, Leigh Brackett, and Ray Bradbury—whose interest in Mars Baron traces to Lowell, explored the broader ramifications, many of them nightmarish, of a Martopia. One could add Philip K. Dick, whose Martian Time-Slip (1964) incorporates Lowell’s canal network into a disquieting account of a failing Martian society. In Dick’s story “Survey Team” (1954), astronauts fleeing a trashed Earth arrive on Mars in hope of starting again. When they discover the ruins of a city, they realize that humanity has already started again once before—on Earth, after first having ruined Mars.
In “The Million-Year Picnic,” collected in Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950), a man fleeing nuclear war brings his wife and young children to go boating on the canals, speeding past dead Martian cities. After Earth is destroyed, the father informs the family that they will not return home. To cheer up his children, he promises he will show them some real Martians. He walks them to the edge of the canal:
“I’ve always wanted to see a Martian,” said Michael. “Where are they, Dad? You promised.”
“There they are,” said Dad, and he shifted Michael on his shoulder and points straight down….
The Martians were there—in the canal—reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad.
But the most elegant exploration of the conceit comes in the sixth chapter of The Martian Chronicles, originally published under the title “Mars Is Heaven!” Astronauts landing on Mars are startled to encounter a bucolic farm town resembling that of their childhoods, populated by their dead relatives. Beguiled by the chance to reclaim their lost innocence, they don’t realize, until it’s too late, that their mothers and fathers have been impersonated by shape-shifting, bloodthirsty aliens.
For the last six decades the fount of Martian ideation has been the US government. NASA has been exploring Martian colonization since its founding in 1958, when it studied the possibility of using nuclear-powered rockets to propel us there. It now expects to put people on Mars as early as 2033, when orbital paths will allow for the shortest possible round-trip mission in the next fifteen years. Dennis Bushnell, until recently the chief scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center, has called colonization “increasingly feasible” and also increasingly desirable, owing to “possibly existential societal issues, including climate change, the crashing ecosystem, machines taking the jobs, etc.” (In that “etc.” you can detect a hand-waving gesture to the obvious inevitability of civilizational decline.) A similar logic has led the sophist-plutocrats of our day to take it upon themselves to accelerate the creation of a Martian colony in which to establish their own desired utopias; in a recent interview Peter Thiel described Martian colonization as “a political project.”
The first structures might be built on Mars within a generation. And when they are, can there be any doubt that one of them will be named after the man who prepared the public for the possibility of Martian life? He may not be granted the honor of a settlement, a rocket base, or even a road, but surely he will not be denied the first canal.
Until then his extraplanetary legacy rests on the Lowell Regio—the name given to Pluto’s north pole—and two craters. One is on the moon. The other, an impact crater about 125 miles in diameter, lies in the Aonia Terra region of the southern Martian highlands. Even our most sophisticated telescopes are incapable of detecting it, but in photographs taken by orbiting spacecraft, the Lowell Crater resembles a dark hooded eye, glaring back at Earth.
English (US) · 