In ‘The Martians,’ creator David Baron explores Mars mania of the twentieth century

In 1906, the New York Times ran the headline, “There is life on the planet Mars.”

It was based mostly on the work of Percival Lowell, a professor who was satisfied Mars contained a collection of irrigation canals constructed by a dying civilization.

People packed lecture halls to listen to Lowell, of the Boston Brahmin Lowells, who was fairly satisfied we’d all quickly be talking to Martians.

There had been scientists who tried to counter Lowell’s declare, saying he was solely seeing what he wished to see. But the nation was convulsed with giddy anticipation and dancing; Orchestras performed a brand new two-step known as, “A Signal from Mars.”

Science author David Baron has written a e book about all of it: “Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.”

“Mars seems to have a place in our culture beyond the other planets,” Baron says. “It’s a place of adventure and imagination and mystery, and that sent me on this exploration into history.”

6 questions with David Baron

What despatched you in your journey to analysis the Martian craze?

“I used to be born within the Nineteen Sixties, and it usually appeared like I used to be surrounded by Martians. I imply, on Saturday morning cartoons, there was Bugs Bunny with Marvin the Martian, who appeared intent on destroying the Earth. There was that sitcom known as ‘My Favorite Martian.’ There had been Martians in outdated motion pictures, sci-fi motion pictures. There was Martians in comedian books.

“Now I’m a science author. I write about astronomy, and as an grownup, I got here to marvel, ‘where did that all come from? Where did this general idea that there’s one thing magical about Mars?’

“And when I started looking at newspapers from the very beginning of the 20th century, my jaw just dropped because here were articles in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Herald proclaiming the existence of the Martians in all seriousness.”

What sparked the Martian craze?

“So by way of the Mars portion, some astronomers had been reporting these unusual straight strains, crisscrossing Mars. An Italian named Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877 first reported them. He known as them canali, which meant channels. He thought they had been perhaps water channels of some type. It was mistranslated into English as canals.

“But at first, people joked about the idea of canals on Mars. Later, there was a serious idea that there were canals on Mars. But why did people want to believe there were canal-building Martians? Science at that point, for several centuries, had been undermining religious beliefs and a belief in a God who was actively involved in human affairs. From Copernicus to Galileo, to Newton to Darwin, it seemed harder and harder to believe that there was something special about us and that someone was looking out for us. And these Martians were thought to be superhuman. They were beyond us in evolution. They were more moral than us. They were more technologically savvy, and the thought was they were almost guardian angels looking down on us, who, when we could communicate with them, could be our saviors.”

 Enter Percival Lowell. How does he turn out to be your central character?

“ He came from one of the most storied families in New England, the Lowells, who founded the city of Lowell, Massachusetts. As he approached the age of 40, he became fascinated with Mars. He was reading what some astronomers in Europe were saying about the possibility of life on Mars, and he used his vast fortune to establish an observatory in Arizona. It’s still there, the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. And he saw these weird straight lines crisscrossing Mars, and he came up with a theory that in fact, they were canals, not navigation canals, but irrigation canals. Mars, he said, was a dying planet. It was older than Earth. It was losing its water, and as it was drying out. The Martian civilization, in order to survive, had to bring meltwater from the polar ice caps, where all the moisture was left, and bring it down to their desert farms and their cities. It was taken as an interesting idea for a while. But eventually it really settled in as almost proven that this was the case.”

 Talk about how this bought inflated and the way it gave individuals a lot hope.

“Part of it was Percival Lowell was giving people back something that they had lost, which was the idea of these supernatural beings who could become our saviors. There are these wonderful depictions of Martians from the time, some of them winged like angels, actually watching the earth. So that here we are, down having our little lives, imagining that there are these superior beings on the planet next door who could become our saviors. So even though H.G. Wells actually wrote ‘The War of the Worlds’ in the 1890s, and his Martians were these evil creatures come to earth to destroy us and take over the planet. That was not the widespread view of what the supposed real Martians were like. They were beings we should emulate.”

How did the idea crumble?

“In 1909, there was an astronomer in France who, in fact, had been a canalist. He had mapped the canals on Mars but started to question his own vision and whether maybe he was being tricked by his eye. And on a particularly clear night in 1909, when Mars was at its closest approach to Earth in about 15 years, looking through, in fact, the largest telescope in Europe, this astronomer named [Eugène] Antoniadi didn’t see the canals. They vanished, and so the idea started to really build that maybe the lines were never there at all.”

 Are we seeing perhaps one thing else play out the place we see an enormous swath of the nation now believing issues that aren’t true about, let’s say, vaccines?

“There’s a giant debate about local weather change, I imply, among the many public, if not amongst scientists. We all need to be careful for our biases. Right? And finding out what’s true and what isn’t true will be tough. We all can get caught up in these perception techniques and give attention to any form of proof that helps what we already consider and dismiss something that’s outdoors it. It was true again then by way of believing within the Martians. I’m positive it’s been true ceaselessly, so long as there have been people, and so we now have to watch out about getting caught up in concepts with out actually testing them and being skeptical of our personal beliefs.

“But it’s additionally an inspiring story. Percival Lowell died in 1916, and at that time, it had fairly effectively been proven that this complete concept of the Martians was fallacious. The obituaries had been very forgiving. They had been speaking about how this was a person who impressed the general public to get enthusiastic about outer house, regardless that his Martians by no means existed.  And actually, it was that Mars craze on the flip of the final century that impressed trendy science fiction, that began this complete new literary style.

“But beyond that, the scientists who took us into outer space did so because of the Mars craze. Robert H. Goddard, the father of American rocketry who built the first liquid-fueled rocket when he was a teen, read H.G. Wells’ ‘The War of the Worlds’ about Mars and thought, ‘I wonder if we could go there?’, and he dedicated his life to coming up with a way to send people eventually into outer space. There are lots of stories like that. The ripples of that crazy time come all the way down to today in terms of laying the groundwork for the space age and for our own ability to get to Mars, perhaps sending people there as soon as the next decade.”

Book excerpt: ‘The Martians’

By David Baron

Excerpted from “The Martians” by David Baron, © 2025. Reprinted with permission from the writer. All rights reserved.

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Thomas Danielian produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Allison Hagan produced it for the net.

This article was initially printed on WBUR.org.

Copyright 2025 WBUR