There are no canals on Mars and there never were. However,
for a time during the late 19th and early 20th centuries
this belief was widely held, due to false interpretations of what was being
seen through telescopes and an unfortunate mistranslation.
The supposed canals of Mars
The blame for the error, although “blame” is probably a
harsh word to use here, belongs to an Italian astronomer named Giovanni
Schiaparelli (1835-1910) who took advantage of the relative closeness of Mars
to Earth in 1877 to draw a map of the planet based on his observations.
Schiaparelli was well aware of the earlier observations by
William Herschel (1738-1822) that revealed that the ice caps on the poles of
Mars grew and shrank as the seasons passed, just as they did on Earth. Herschel
had also spotted that the dark regions on the surface also changed in area, and
his theory was that meltwater from the poles was causing huge floods. Other
observers reckoned that the dark patches were forests or other vegetation that
varied in area as the seasons changed.
With this mindset firmly established, Schiaparelli believed
that he could trace lines that connected the dark and light areas and that
these could well be rivers flowing from and to oceans. He marked the rivers by
using the word “canali”, which is the Italian for “channels”.
However, the combination of the word on the map and the fact
that Schiaparelli drew his channels with dead straight lines led many
non-Italian commentators to dub them “canals”, and that gave rise to huge speculation
that there must be intelligent life on Mars that was capable of creating
massive structures that criss-crossed the planet for hundreds of miles and were
broad enough to be seen from millions of miles way through Earth-based
telescopes.
Schiaparelli was not alone in his “channels” theory. In
Arizona the American amateur astronomer Percival Lowell (1855-1916) built his
own observatory with the express purpose of searching for life on Mars. The
maps he drew were like those of Schiaparelli in that they included straight
lines that Lowell was convinced were artificial canals.
The War of the Worlds
The belief that Martians existed entered public
consciousness to the extent that widespread panic was caused in October 1938
when the actor and director Orson Welles presented a radio drama of H G Wells’s
“The War of the Worlds”. Wells had written his story in 1898 and presented a
scenario in which the Martians, who are a naturally warlike race given their
“god of war” tag, invade Planet Earth and in particular the commuter towns just
south of London. Pirated printed versions of the story appeared in the United
States, setting the events in New York and Boston, and it may have been one of
these versions that attracted Orson Welles to make his dramatization which was
broadcast on American radio.
At any event, the broadcast was done in such a realistic way
that many people were panicked into believing that a real Martian invasion was
taking place. This would not have happened if there was not general public belief
in actual Martians, and that would not have happened if the “canals” theory had
not been widely accepted.
Sorry to disappoint you!
Of course, we now know that there are no oceans on Mars and
no canals or rivers. There is evidence that river systems did once exist on the
planet but all liquid surface water dried up millions of years ago. The
“oceans” that Herschel spotted are known to be areas of bare rock that are
sometimes covered by dust blown there by massive windstorms. The people of
Planet Earth may have many things to worry about, but an invasion by
canal-building Martians is not one of them!
© John Welford
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