"The Martians" by David Baron

Mars is held in high esteem on Earth. It’s a neighboring planet but, unlike Venus, our neighbor closest to the Sun, the planet stands as the closest thing to Earth in our solar system.

It’s not inhabited, but robots now roving the planet continue to search for evidence that there might have been life there once. But when H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds in 1897, a tale about an attack from beyond, it came at a time when Mars had become a hot topic. You had songs, dances, and advertisements all focused on the red planet. On Broadway, you had the comedy, A Message from Mars.

David Baron, a former science correspondent for NPR whose previous book, American Eclipse, chronicled America’s fascination with the solar eclipse of 1878, takes up the subject of this fascination with Mars in his latest effort, The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.

Baron came by his interest in Mars through America’s space program. “I was raised on spacemen and Martians. It was on TV that I saw Martians, too,” said Baron, referring to My Favorite Martian, the sitcom that starred Ray Walston and Bill Bixby, and Marvin the Martian on the Looney Tunes that aired on Saturday morning.

The central figure in Baron’s study is Percival Lowell, a Bostonian blueblood who graduated from Harvard in 1876. Lowell sets up an observatory in Flagstaff, Az. and becomes the nation’s leading proponent of life on Mars. 

In 1895, Lowell presented a program of “observations on Mars” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Downtown Boston. Lowell suggested that life on Mars may have had a head start. “Perhaps intelligence, indeed civilization, had emerged there eons ago, in ample time to adapt to the looming water crisis…Irrigation, and upon as vast a scale as possible, must be the all-engrossing Martian pursuit,” noted Lowell.

The question of canals on Mars, shadowy lines on the planet’s surface that appeared to some astronomers, was not a question to Lowell. “The canals are constructed for the express purpose of fertilizing the oases,” he said.

Nikola Tesla is also drawn into the Mars controversy as the inventor sought to communicate with Mars through the wireless (radio) beams he was experimenting with.

Baron noted that H.G. Wells wrote a story for Cosmopolitan Magazine in 1908 called “The Things That Live on Mars,” the apparent result of a meeting between Wells and Lowell in 1906. In the magazine story, Wells rejected his earlier conception of Martians as gelatinous, blood-thirsty monsters on stilts, said Baron. “They will probably have heads and eyes and backboned bodies, and …big shapely skulls,” noted Wells.

One of the more interesting aspects of the Martian craze was the publication of a newspaper cartoon in 1907 of a Martian called Mr. Skygack who comes to Earth to make ironic observations about day-to-day life.

While the scientific community, which always had reservations about Lowell’s observations, provided evidence that Mars was not only uninhabited but as desolate as our Moon, Lowell was a believer of Martians to the end. He died in 1916 when “the animating force of his imaginative mind departed his body forever,” wrote Baron.

Obituaries of the day largely lauded Lowell, noted Baron, adding that the excitement over Mars also inspired future generations. Robert Goddard who developed the concept of rockets said that he first got excited about the concept of blasting off from Earth from War of the Worlds. 

Carl Sagan, the astronomer who opened up the universe for millions on PBS television, and Hugo Gernsback, who coined the term “science fiction,” also credited the Martian craze for stimulating their interest in space.