Martian canal

For a time in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was believed that there were canals on Mars. These were a network of long straight lines that appeared in drawings of the planet Mars in the equatorial regions from 60° N. to 60° S. Lat., first observed by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli during the opposition of 1877, and confirmed by later observers. Schiaparelli called these canali, which was translated into English as "canals" (see below). The Irish astronomer Charles E. Burton made some of the earliest drawings of straight-line features on Mars, although his drawings did not match Schiaparelli's.

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Controversy

Some people went so far as to propose the idea that the canals were irrigation canals built by a supposed intelligent civilization on Mars. Percival Lowell was a strong proponent of this view, pushing the idea much further than Schiaparelli, who for his part considered much of the detail on Lowell's drawings to be imaginary. Some observers drew maps in which dozens if not hundreds of canals were shown with an elaborate nomenclature for all of them. Some observers saw a phenomenon they called "gemination", or doubling — two parallel canals.

Other observers disputed the notion of canals as well. The gifted observer E. E. Barnard did not see them. In 1903, J. E. Evans and Edward Maunder conducted visual experiments using schoolboy volunteers that demonstrated how the canals could arise as an optical illusion,^[1], since when a poor quality telescope views an object with many point-like features (e.g. sunspots or craters) they 'appear' to join up to form lines.^[2] In 1907 the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace published the book Is Mars Habitable? that severely criticized Lowell's claims. Wallace's analysis showed that the surface of Mars was almost certainly much colder than Lowell had estimated, that the atmospheric pressure was too low for liquid water to exist on the surface, and he pointed out that several recent efforts to find evidence of water vapor in the Martian atmosphere with spectroscopic analysis had failed. He concluded that complex life was impossible, let alone the planet girding irrigation system claimed by Lowell.^[3] The influential observer Eugène Antoniadi used the 83-cm telescope at Meudon Observatory at the 1909 opposition of Mars and saw no canals, and the notion of canals began to fall out of favor. Around this time spectroscopic analysis also began to show that no water was present in the Martian atmosphere.^[2]

The arrival of the space probe Mariner 4 in 1965, which took pictures revealing impact craters and a generally barren landscape, was the final nail in the coffin of the idea that Mars could be inhabited by higher forms of life.

History of canals

  The Italian word canale (plural canali) can mean "canals" (including artificial canals or ducts) or "channels" or "gullies".^[4] This ambiguity also exists in cognate words in other Romance languages such as French (canal), and also in German (Kanal).

The first person to use the word canale in connection with Mars was Angelo Secchi in 1858, although he did not see any straight lines and applied the term to large features —for example, he used the name "Atlantic Canale" for what later came to be called Syrtis Major.

It is often stated that Schiaparelli intended the meaning "channels" and that "canals" was a misunderstanding or mistranslation into English. Nevertheless, the English term "canals" was used from the very earliest accounts in English, and as far as is known, Schiaparelli made no effort to correct the supposed misunderstanding if he was aware of it. As the word "canal" can also mean "channel" or "watercourse" – not necessarily artificial – in English, the charge of "mistranslation" is unwarranted.

It is perhaps not so odd that the idea of Martian canals was so readily accepted by many. At the time, in the late 19th century, telescopic observers had difficulty distinguishing exactly what they were seeing when they looked at Mars (indeed, it was not until the era of space probes that a clear picture emerged). They saw some lighter or darker albedo features (for instance Syrtis Major) and believed that they were seeing oceans and continents. They also believed that Mars had a relatively substantial atmosphere. They knew that the rotation period of Mars (the length of its day) was almost the same as Earth's, and they knew that Mars' axial tilt was also almost the same as Earth's, which meant it had seasons in the astronomical and meteorological sense. They could also see Mars' polar ice caps shrinking and growing with these changing seasons. It was only when they interpreted changes in surface features as being due to the seasonal growth of plants that life was hypothesized by them (in fact, Martian dust storms are responsible for some of this). By the late 1920s, however, it was known that Mars was very dry and had a very low atmospheric pressure.

In addition, the late 19th century was a time of great canal building on Earth. For instance, the Suez Canal was completed in 1869, and the abortive French attempt to build the Panama Canal began in 1880. It is perhaps natural that some thought similar projects were being undertaken on Mars. In 1889, astronomer Charles A. Young reported that Schiaparelli's canal discovery of 1877 had been confirmed in 1881, though new canals had appeared where there hadn't been any before, prompting "very important and perplexing" questions as to their origin.^[5]

During the favourable opposition of 1892, W. H. Pickering observed numerous small circular black spots occurring at every intersection or starting-point of the "canals". Many of these had been seen by Schiaparelli as larger dark patches, and were termed seas or lakes; but Pickering's observatory was at Arequipa, Peru, about 2400 meters above the sea, and with such atmospheric conditions as were, in his opinion, equal to a doubling of telescopic aperture. They were soon detected by other observers, especially by Lowell.

During the oppositions of 1892 and 1894, seasonal color changes were reported. As the polar snows melted the adjacent seas appeared to overflow and spread out as far as the tropics, and were often seen to assume a distinctly green colour. The idea that Schiaparelli's canali were really irrigation canals made by intelligent beings, was first hinted at, and then adopted as the only intelligible explanation, by Lowell and a few others. Newspaper and magazine articles about Martian canals captured the public imagination.

At this time (1894) it began to be doubted whether there were any seas at all on Mars. Under the best conditions, these supposed 'seas' were seen to lose all trace of uniformity, their appearance being that of a mountainous country, broken by ridges, rifts, and canyons, seen from a great elevation. These doubts soon became certainties, and it is now almost universally admitted that Mars possesses no permanent bodies of surface water.

Fiction

Although the concept of the canals had been available since Schiaparelli's 1877 description of them, early fictional descriptions of Mars omitted these features. They receive no mention, for instance, in H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (1897), which describes a slowly drying Mars, covetous of Earth's resources, but one which still has dwindling oceans such as are depicted on Schiaparelli's maps. Later works of fiction, influenced by the works of Lowell, described an ever-more arid Mars, and the canals became more a more prominent feature, though how they were explained varied widely from author to author.

• Garrett P. Serviss' Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898) repeatedly mentions Schiaparellian canals (which play a key part in the denouement of the story), but does not describe them in detail, apparently considering them simply irrigation canals comparable to those on Earth — ignoring the fact that, in that case, they could hardly be visible from Earth. Serviss' Mars also has lakes and oceans.
• George Griffiths' A Honeymoon in Space (1900) describes the canals as the remnants of gulfs and straits "widened and deepened and lengthened by... Martian labour".
• Edgar Rice Burroughs' influential A Princess of Mars (1912) describes an almost entirely desert Mars, with only one small body of liquid water on the surface (though swamps and forests appear in the sequels). The canals, or waterways as Burroughs calls them, are still irrigation works, but these are surrounded by wide cultivated tracts of farmland which make their visibility somewhat credible.
• Otis Adelbert Kline's Outlaws of Mars (1933) has multiple parallel canals, surrounded by walls and terraces, and describes the construction of the canals by Martian machines.
• In C. S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet (1938), the "canals" (handramit in Martian) are actually vast rifts in the surface of a nearly airless, desert Mars, in which the only breathable atmosphere and water have collected and where life is possible, the rest of Mars being entirely dead.
• In Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950), the canals are artificial waterways stretching between stone banks, filled with blue water, or sometimes poetically described as full of "green liquors" or "lavender wine". Bradbury revisited Mars' canals in 1967 in his short story The Lost City of Mars.
• In the BBC radio production Journey into Space: The Red Planet (1954-1955), the canals are valleys filled with a plant life resembling giant rhubarbs.
• The Mars of the steampunk RPG Space: 1889 (1988) is crisscrossed by artificial canals which support cities inhabited by the ancient civilization of the Canal Martians.

List of canals

Main article: List of Martian canals

The canals were named, by Schiaparelli and others, after real and legendary rivers of various places on Earth or the mythological underworld.

See also

• Classical albedo features on Mars
• Face on Mars
• Life on Mars

References

1. ^ Evans, J. E. and Maunder, E. W. (1903) "Experiments as to the Actuality of the 'Canals' observed on Mars", MNRAS, 63 (1903) 488
2. ^ ^{a b} Chambers P. (1999), , London: Blandford, ISBN 0713727470
3. ^ Wallace, Alfred. Is Mars Habitable (S730: 1907). The Alfred Russel Wallace Page hosted by Western Kentucky University. Retrieved on 2007-05-13.
4. ^ http://www.wordreference.com/it/en/translation.asp?iten=canali
5. ^ Young, Charles A. "A Textbook of General Astronomy. 1889. Ginn and Co. Boston.

References

• Wallace, A. R. (1907) Is Mars habitable? A critical examination of Professor Percival Lowell's book "Mars and its canals", with an alternative explanation, by Alfred Russel Wallace, F.R.S., etc. London, Macmillan and co.
• Antoniadi, E. M. (1910) "Sur la nature des »canaux« de Mars", AN 183 (1910) 221/222 (in French)