In 1877, a frumpish Italian fella by the name of Giovanni Schiaparelli literally had his panties in a twist over a major event. He was so excited that he swore off alcohol and narcotics for weeks before hand to ensure his faculties were all in tip top shape. Hell, the man even quit drinking coffee because he was worried it would give him the jitters. So what was he so excited about? Why the planet Mars being super close to Earth of course. Oh yeah, I probably should’ve mentioned that good old Gio was in charge of Italy’s biggest observatory, and that said observatory had just installed a brand spanking new high powered telescope. Now you’re probably sarcastically saying whoopee-dee-doo, but let me tell me you, it was definitely an alignment of factors sure to get any astronomer all hot and bothered.
Anyways, on a crisp September night, Geo pointed his new toy at the red dot in the sky, pressed his eye against the telescope’s lens, and perceived a whole other world in detail never before imagined. Gio spent the entire night scribbling notes and drawing maps, revealing a Martian surface made up of dark and light patches crisscrossed by numerous deep channels. Reeling from such a heady experience, Gio soon after wrote a scientific paper about his observations that was eagerly read by astronomers from around the world. This of course required a lot of translation, which was of course where the problem began. When the paper was translated into English, the translator took the Italian word for channel, which is canali, and translated it as canal, probably because they wanted to hurry up and get done so they could get laid or something. When the astronomers of the time noticed the mistake, they had a good laugh about it, then went back to staring at the stars. It was only a small mistake, hardly anyone ever read astronomy papers, and those who did weren’t stupid enough to think anything of it.
Enter Percival Lowell. Percy was a rich kid with an interest in math. He graduated from Harvard in 1876 and was considered to be an up and coming fellow, what with his boatloads of cash. However, instead of doing anything math like at all, he instead ran a cotton mill for six years and then traveled to Japan and Korea. His initial vacation became a stay of several years, which probably had nothing to do with the fact that it was common at the time for women to walk around topless in both countries. Either way, he wrote some pretty good books about his experiences. Such was Percy’s life until one day he happened upon an astronomy paper by our old friend Gio, describing the “canals” of Mars. Percy, upon seeing the word canals, came to the conclusion that there must be life on Mars and dedicated the rest of his life to proving it.
Now for some strange reason preeminent astronomers had no interest in letting some random rich guy use their telescopes to prove his crackpot theories based on a typo. Undeterred, Percy used his family’s money to build his own observatory in Arizona in 1894. Thus situated, he began spending every night studying the red dot in the sky. Squinting through one of the most powerful telescopes in the world, he was amazed to see straight lines stretching thousands of miles across the Martian surface. He reported his findings to the astronomers who replied in various ways which boiled down to calling him an idiot. Still undeterred, Percy wrote a series of books about his findings describing a mythical Martian society building massive canals in a desperate attempt to save their civilization on a dying world. I’ll let you guess which theory the public went wild about. Did you guess the one put forward by the top scientists? Well, if so, then you my friend have no clue how the world works. The public went crazy for Percy’s books, and life on Mars became a widespread belief which spawned countless books, radio shows, and films for half a century.
For his part, Percy moved on from Mars and began studying Venus, which lo and behold, seemed to have canals as well. Fun fact, astronomers staring through high powered telescopes often begin seeing the veins in their own eyes. Percy was basically drawing maps of his own eyeball. Though every member of the scientific community who was not a crackpot thought Percy was nuts, he continued to promote his theories about Martian societies for the rest of his life. His later years were spent searching for an imaginary planet, creatively named Planet X, and marrying his secretary, though afterwards he still made her work as his secretary. Percy died in 1916 from a stroke brought on by kicking his butler down a flight of stairs. His theories were not fully debunked in the public eye until NASA started sending probes to Mars in the 1960's and found it to be pretty much just a big red rock.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Percival_Lowell_observing_Venus_from_the_Lowell_Observatory_in_1914.jpg