JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
Edmund Ledger (1841-1914, 38-year Member Royal Astronomical Society, professor of astronomy at Gresham College, 1875-1914) asks an excellent question in his short article, “The Canals of Mars”, in the Scientific American Supplement of 1903 (#1434 June 27, 1903, p 22983-4). He quickly reviews some current thinking on Schiaparelli's canali and their reception as “canals”, made by Martians, and in his doubt asks the question: “Are they really there?”1
The canals had been questioned before of course, including by Ledger himself. Earlier in 1895 Ledger described one impossibility of the Seechi-named and employed-by- Schiaparelli canali as canals just in their sheer size: that in order for astronomers to observe the canals that they had to be at least 20 miles wide in addition to being thousands of miles long...a feat too great for anything to accomplish, something far beyond comprehension. (The Suez canal, completed not long before this, would have been nothing compared to the Martian works, being just about five times as long as the canali were thought to be wide. Also thinking no doubt would have been tempered in a bad way—like a poorly tempered anvil and its unpleasing response to being struck by a hammer—by the French failures in the decades that they squandered trying to build the 50-mile-long Panama Canal.)
In the next year, in the article “Are the Canals of Mars Illusions?” in Scientific American (12 March 1904 issue), the imagery of the “created image” is continued. In this article the work of Mr. E. W. Maunder and E. M. Antoniadi is described as is their evocative and poetic conclusions about the “Martian Canal system...figured by Schiaparelli and others” being “largely an illusion”, discussing the possibility that the canals were “cerebral images”. There wouldn't be a true "first" photograph of the canals until Carl O. Lampland's successes in the summer of 1905--they indeed proved the existence of canals of some sort, but the work by Lowell's assistant although good enough to prove that something was indeed there they were not good enough to prove Lowell's point, though they were still used as confirmation of the theories in spite of their failings. As a matter of fact the British Astronomical Society adopted the position in their 1906 annual meeting that the Lampland photos served as the confirmation that Lowell had been seeking. It would be the Frenchman Antoniadi who would in 1909-1910 put the final blow to Lowell's ideas of a creative intelligence being the primum mobili of the canals through a series of painstakingly-made photos of the planet with Europe's largest telescope, at Meudon. They revealed that the canals as hard geometric forms had indeed been a sort of optical illusion, and that the new photos showed them in their true and far more complex existence.
Notes:
- Even at this early date in the issue of Life-on-Mars there was a fair amount of information disseminated to the general scientific periodicals like the Scientific American. For example, as early as 1873 the question is asked "The Planet Mars—Is it Inhabited?" (Scientific American 29, 210-210, 4 October 1873); along with "Another World Inhabited like our Own" (Supplement 7, 2787-2788 10 May 1879); and "Signaling to the Planets" by Robert S. Ball, Supplement 32, 13106-13107, 19 September 1891). Then of course came the full-court press of Percival Lowell, seeing his first effort to Scientific American Supplement in "Mars" , (vol 38, 15724-15724. 10 November 1894); with the idea of constructed canals and vegetation visited in "Artificial Imitation of the Germination of the Canals of Mars", (Supplement 35, 14361-14362, 25 March 1893); and "The Circulation of Water in the Atmosphere of Mars" by Camille Flammarion (Supplement 39, 16112-16112, 27 April 1895). And so on. Perhaps I like the Ledger question so much because it is so clear and direct. Overall in nearly all of these articles that I have seen in the SciAm very very few supported the Lowell theories outside of Lowell himself.
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