Martians land in print
The first one landed on Sunday, Aug. 12, 1877, in the dense verbiage of Page One. It was an adjective: “Martian forests.” The nouns would soon follow.
That Mars should produce Martians had become increasingly obvious to observers on Earth. Even to early telescopes it was large (arguably the second-nearest planet), always fully illuminated by the sun and colorful, mostly red, but sometimes showing hints of white or even blue or green. By 1800, astronomers had worked out that, like Earth, Mars had polar ice caps, was tilted on its axis and thus offered seasons, had an atmosphere of sorts, and rotated roughly every 24 hours. It was Earth’s twin, plain as Martian day.
In 1871, in a popular British literary magazine, Richard A. Proctor, a respected astronomer, reflected at length on the possibility of life on Mars. He envisaged “Martial oceans” and “Martial seas,” as well as Martial valleys, poles, winds, skies and mornings, and supposed that “Martialists” might be 14 feet tall and busily at work building roads, canals and bridges.
“Martialist” soon evolved into “Martian” and, in 1877, an adjectival form reached The Times, in an excerpt from a new article by Proctor taking issue with the idea that Mars’s ruddy color could be explained by “the red leaves of Martian trees,” as a French astronomer had proposed.
Two months later, an Italian astronomer identified “canali” on the planet — which, in English and French, became “canals.” Lo, the Martians — now rapidly colonizing the publishing landscape as nouns — had shovels as well as oars. They were engineer-navigators, farmers with boats and epic irrigation schemes. The Times noted the discovery, and the nouns, casually in 1882: “Of course, the Martians are a sea-faring people,” a point so self-evident by now that it was relegated to Page 8.
The Times gave voice to the occasional skeptic — the “so-called canals” (1893) were “a delusion” (1909) — but considered Martians without fear or favor. “The straight lines on Mars and on Venus may not be canals,” according to the paper in 1904, “but since we do not know what they are we might as well give up being dogmatic as to what they are not.”
But the crash was coming. On Jan. 23, 1916, a story in The New York Times Sunday Magazine — “Canals of Mars Called an Optical Illusion” — reported that, viewed at higher resolution, the spidery network of Martian lines was an array of unrelated dots. The canals were a “fallacy,” The Times reported. The first close-up photograph of Mars, transmitted by the Mariner 4 spacecraft and published on the front page on July 16, 1965, did “not show any of the controversial canals.” The planet was dry, its atmosphere thin, the magnetic field weak. On July 21, 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 lander settled on the front page with “spectacular photographs of a rocky, wind-scoured desert plain.”
A half-century later, the search for life on Mars continues, although expectations are smaller; the discovery even of fossil microbes would be considered world-changing. — Alan Burdick
