Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Book Club Edition: The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America by David Baron

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

There was a time when almost everyone, from Alexander Graham Bell to the Wall Street Journal, believed there was a supremely intelligent civilization on Mars, one that was probably trying to talk to Earthlings. Most of this belief could be traced to an amateur astronomer and charismatic speaker named Percival Lowell. David Baron tells this story in “The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America,” the product of seven years of research into this strange chapter of history. He shares many of the most surprising, fascinating, and very entertaining details, including much that had been lost to history, in this book club conversation with Mat Kaplan. Discover more at: https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/book-club-david-baronSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Martians are coming. The Martians are coming. That's this time on Planetary Radio Book Club edition. Welcome back, book fans. I'm Matt Kaplan, Senior Communications Advisor at the Planetary Society, and former host of Planetary Radio. Do we ever have a fun one for you this time? Science journalist and author David Barron, will take us back to the dawn of the 20th century with the Martians, the true story of an alien craze that captured turn-of-the-century America. This excellent and very entertaining read was recently named a New Yorker Best Book of the Year, and New York Times book review editor's choice. David was my planetary radio guest back in 2017 when we talked about his previous book,

American Eclipse. Now, as tantalizing evidence of past life on Mars grows, he has written the definitive story about a time when almost everyone took for granted that a superintelligent civilization had long existed on the red planet and that they might be reaching out to us. It's an era that has fascinated me ever since I first read about Percival Lowell and his Martian canals. The Martians was our September selection in the planetary system. Society Book Club. Members of the Society get to participate in our live conversations with authors of the wonderful books we select each month. You can learn about this and all the other benefits of membership at planetary.org slash join. If you're a long-time fan of public radio, like me, you may remember David Barron's great contributions to national public radio.

He is written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, and many other publications. It was my great pleasure to welcome him, as I said, to Planetary Radio. That was in 2017 when his previous terrific book, American Eclipse, was published in that year of a total solar eclipse across a swath of North America. Let us go ahead now and bring into the picture here. our guest, David Barron. David, welcome to the book club. Thank you, Matt. It's very nice to talk to you again.

It is just lovely and an honor to have you back. Thank you so much for this terrific book, which was such fun to read. And we both had the idea to wear red shirts tonight. Yes, look at this, folks. Not only red shirts, but also Marvin. Marvin the Martian ties. I've got to be the most famous Martian. They did not co-operate this.

not planned folks just wonderful serendipity let me start with this your dedication in the book to my nieces and nephews may your generation be the first to cross the ocean of interplanetary space David we're the planetary society nothing could hit home more deeply for us that was that was really touching well and I completely support what you guys are all about I think the space really is the next frontier, and I would like to see us get going. From your mouth to many, many years at NASA and elsewhere. Here's another quote from the opening of the book, this one from the central character in the book, Percival Lowell.

Mankind has to all intents and purposes been journeying Marsward through the years, said Percy. It's still true, isn't it? Absolutely. I mean, I ended up writing this book. which is about events that occurred over 100 years ago because they resonate so much with what's going on today in so many ways that I'm sure we'll talk about. The most obvious way is the excitement that we still have about Mars. You know, Mars still has a special place in the public's imagination. Some of that traces back to what the time I write about.

But it is, you know, I mean, we still dream of Mars and hope that we might have a better future there. absolutely and we might be getting closer it's kind of like power from fusion it's like it's it's just around the corner and always will be exactly it's roughly the quote here is a line i believe this is a line of yours from the opening of the book or the first chapter there is something about mars that transcends all other astronomical bodies it possesses an undeniable aura of mystery and romance an allure not fully explained by its physical reality, which is very true. I mean, it's something you address it at some length in the book as well.

I mean, why do you think Mars has held this fascination for us back to the time of the ancients? Well, I mean, and that really was the central question I was setting out to answer. Now, I don't know about since the time of the ancients, certainly, I mean, we all know, I mean, Mars was talked about in ancient times as being this mysterious red light in the sky and it becomes bright every couple of years, and then it sort of fades away. It was a great mystery, and people saw it as an omen, a portent.

But for most of human history, people didn't understand that those lights, these strange lights in the skies were other worlds. That's a relatively recent discovery. And I really think that the idea that Mars versus the other planets is this place that really captures the imagination comes primarily from the time I write about, that we have sort of this cultural memory of believing that Mars was hiding some great secret. And that great secret for a while was believed was that it actually had an advanced civilization. I'm blown away by the degree to which people believed that that was the case.

I mean, my God, even the New York Times seemed to be absolute believers in this idea of this advanced civilization on the planet oh not just the new york times the wall street journal i mean talk about conservative newspapers that wall street journal the end of 1907 said the biggest news of the year even though there had been a financial crisis it said forget the financial crisis the big news of 1907 was the proof of intelligent life on mars so this it actually started in the what was called the yellow press that's the tabloid press of the time. They really liked the idea that there was life on Mars, but by 1906, 1907, it was very much mainstream. You had folks like Alexander Graham Bell, who of course we remember as the inventor of the telephone, but he was a kind of a, he had become a great man of science

who was one of the founders of the National Geographic Society of Science magazine. He believed very much that there was a civilization on Mars. It was very much mainstream. Alexander Graham Bell, just one of the wonderful, wonderful, characters throughout this book. I mean, Nicola Tesla, who we'll talk more about, Teddy Roosevelt, David and Mabel Todd, H.G. Wells, Camille Flamarian, J.P. Morgan, and of course, Percival Lowell himself. It goes on and on. You describe documenting this bizarre period in history as a love story. Why? So when I came up originally with the idea of the book, I mean, I knew about the general outlines of the story, as I'm sure many folks listening right now do, about the so-called

canals on Mars, which has been remembered as one of the great blunders in science. Percival Lowell, who founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, was the great proponent of this idea that there were these canals on Mars that were dug by the Martians. And it all seemed very silly to me at first. But what I came to realize is that people really loved this idea. they so wished it was true. I mean, it's a story really much more about humans than about Martians, about how we can convince ourselves that things are true that are not because we get so blinded by an idea that we love. And the idea that was loved here was that Mars was a better world than Earth. And that surprised me too because, you know, probably the best-remembered fiction

from that time is H.G. Wells is the War of the Worlds in which the Martians came to Earth to conquer us. That was not the widespread view of the supposed real Martians. The real Martians were a moral, peaceful civilization that, in fact, we should emulate. And, you know, people, it's the same today. There was war and violence and political upset on Earth, and people looked to Mars as perhaps hope for a better future. So people really did fall in love with this idea of Mars. This is such a tale of, in large part, self-deception on Lowell's part and others, or at least, you know, massive confirmation bias when he and the others looking through telescopes and not being able to do photography until the end of the period that they may have, as you mentioned in the book, may have been just sort of looking at the reflection of the blood vessels in their own eyes. And yet they became so convinced.

I mean, Lowell, I assume, went to his grave, believing that he had found this evidence of this other civilization. Absolutely. He never backed down. I mean, so Percival Lowell died in 1916 at age 61 of cerebral aneurysm. In those final years, his theory by then had pretty much fallen into disfavor. And people, by the 19-teens, realized they're probably. was not a canal-building civilization on Mars, but Lowell did not back down. He just dug in his heels. And in fact, he portrayed himself as a persecuted genius who someday would be seen as having been right. Alas, he was not right. But, and I'm sure we'll get into this too, he really had a lot of positive influence as well. But his science in the end was clearly wrong.

You've gone exactly where I was hoping to go next, because even though he centered it on, this gigantic mistake. He really did add a lot to our understanding of Mars, didn't he? Well, first of all, I mean, he pushed other astronomers to make their arguments better and to make their own maps of Mars better and come up with their own ways of photographing Mars to see what was really there. But also, I would say, you know, there really was this mystery in the late 19th century. What are these strange lines on Mars? It was not Lowell who started this. It was Giovanni Scaparrelli, the head of the Brera Observatory in Milan, who first reported these lines on Mars, which famously he called canali, which in Italian means channels, and was mistranslated

into English as canals. And sometimes people think that's the whole story, like, oh boy, this is just a case of mistranslation? No, people knew it was a mistranslation, and they sort of joked about it for a while. But when Percival Lowell came along, he was the one who said, you know, I think they really are canals, but not navigation canals, irrigation canals that the Martians living on a planet that was running out of water had built in order to survive so they could irrigate their crops. Early on in the 1890s, I actually think personal, I give Percival Ola a lot of credit. It was an interesting theory. It was not a crazy theory.

You know, we didn't know whether Mars was inhabited, maybe had an intelligent civilization. No one knew what these lines were. they came and went with the seasons so it seemed and lowell was saying in fact he said you're not seeing the water in the canals you're seeing the vegetation growing along the banks of the canals and so the canals did seem to appear in the spring and summer and fade in the fall in the winter so there was a lot about his theory that was interesting to explore and he helped to develop some better techniques of planetary photography in order to prove or so he thought that the lines were really there. So he did a lot of good. Where I fault him is that he just was completely stubborn.

And as evidence came in increasingly to suggest that his evidence maybe was not as good as he thought it was, he would not back down at all. So that's what I think it was his stubbornness that was really his problem. There's this great quote from Lowell in the book, which I won't read, in which he talks really convincingly and accurately about monomania, not realizing he's a victim of it. Yeah, I know. I mean, many of the characters in the book have insight into human foibles, and yet don't realize it's true of themselves.

You mentioned Camille Flamarian, a French astronomer who was just, I mean, he had a cult-like following. He was both an astronomer and a scientist. fiction writer. And it was, in fact, Flamarian, who also believed there was civilization on Mars, who got Lowell excited and inspired Lowell. Well, Flamarian at one point early in his career, he wrote a book about optics and about optical illusions and about how easy it is to trick the human eye. And yet when later on people suggested maybe that's what was going on with him and what he was seeing on Mars, he just completely dismissed it. So he saw

that this was a problem of human beings, but he didn't realize it was a problem in his own eye and brain. I'm going to turn to the chat here, and those of you who are on live, Robert says, thank you for writing this book. I always wanted to understand this story. Kareem said, but isn't being wrong celebrated in science?

They frequently say that if they discover something unexpected, that's exciting. Well, sure, yeah, the people who come up with something that holds up eventually. I mean, I was going to mention this at the very end, and it's almost a cliche now, but it's no less profoundly true. Science eventually self-corrects. This is certainly a great example of that, although it took some years for that to happen, didn't it?

Absolutely. And again, that's where I do not in the least fault Percival Lowell for coming up with the theory, looking for evidence to support it. He would not acknowledge even the smallest problems with his. theory in fact i mean and this is where again how we humans are such interesting creatures when we have a belief that's so strong and we get backed into a wall and someone shows us evidence that clearly we're wrong we can figure out some crazy explanation for why it's true so i'll i'll give one example that i make attention in the book lowells as i said the his theory suggested that what we

were seeing on mars were was the vegetation greening up along the canals as the water came first from the north pole in the northern spring where the melt water from the ice cap was brought down to the deserts down to the equator and even into the southern hemisphere and then six months later on mars in the southern spring when the south pole water melted supposedly that water was brought back up to the equator and into the northern hemisphere well this meant that the water was flowing in both directions in the same canals, which you would think would be a real problem with his theory because obviously water can't flow downhill both ways. But no, Lowell, being the clever man he was, said, no, this showed even more that he was right, because that

meant the water must be pumped. And if the water is pumped, well, then obviously there's a civilization on Mars. This is so true today, obviously, I mean, you can pick your own conspiracy theory, or whatever. But when someone really believes something, logic often will not get them to change their mind because they'll come up with some clever response about how in their worldview, actually, what you just said is proof the other way. You also made me think of this other great bit of history that you found, this newspaper comment about the terrible challenge of completing the Panama Canal, which was underway at the time. huge challenge many many people dying constant problems and this one newspaper writer who said before we dig any farther on that canal it might be well to have mr tesla we'll get into this wire the government of mars and ascertain just how they did it up there without bankrupting the planet oh i could have given you i'm not kidding a hundred other quotes from newspapers saying

about the same thing there were constantly comparisons between the canals on Mars and the trouble that the U.S. was having, kind of building the Panama Canal. And so this whole idea of this more advanced but very benevolent civilization, we'll get to H.D. Wells version soon, too. In a sense, didn't Lowell also strike a blow against anthropocentrism, this idea that humanity is the best that can be found anywhere? Absolutely. I mean, actually, Lowell never, very rarely anyway, speculated on what the Martians might look like. But he was very clear they were not human. Others had all sorts of ideas about what the Martians might look like, whether they were human-like or ant-like or whatever. Yeah, I mean, but he wasn't the only one. I mean, there really was this, I would say this great desire on the part of, humans at that time to want to believe that there must be better beings out there. The end of the 19th century was a difficult time.

We remember it as the gilded age, which makes it sound so glittering. But of course, it was a time of a tremendous divide between the few who were rich and the many who were poor. There was labor unrest. There was anarchy, particularly in Europe. There were terrorist bombings in Paris and elsewhere. Heads of state were being assassinated. William McKinley in the United States was assassinated by an anarchist in 1901. So there was a real feeling that things were falling apart.

And Darwin wasn't that long before had suggested very strongly that we are merely product of evolution. And so, well, if Darwin's right, then there was a belief at the time that evolution was necessarily progressive, that it meant moving from lower order beings to better, more superior beings. Well, then we're somewhere on this ladder of progression presumably in the future we will be better and if there are creatures on other planets maybe they are more advanced than we are and that's exactly what the martians were because mars was widely believed to be an older planet than earth being smaller than earth it must have solidified before earth did from its molten original molten state became habitable before earth

if you imagine that then it had inhabitants they became intelligent before we did and And therefore, the Martians are what we will become in the future. So the hope was, you know, we are looking at what we will aspire to be someday. And maybe we can learn from them. This gets back to Tesla. If we could just communicate with them, maybe they could jumpstart that better future. They could teach us how to be better human beings or better beings of whatever sort. And there's so much of good science.

I mean, what we believe, what we now have great evidence for, about Mars, that it was a world that became habitable probably long before Earth and has had all this time to become less habitable, maybe inhabitable, we don't know yet, but to dry out. And so, you know, makes perfect sense as it was drying out. You smart, capable Martians are going to build some big channels, some big canals. Right. I mean, so, I mean, Lowell extrapolated much too far on the basis of scant evidence in a lot of ways, and he believed it was some law of the universe that a planet will run out of water over time. You know, obviously that has happened to Mars. It hasn't happened to Earth. Different planet, different circumstances. He was right that Mars was running out of water,

but he wasn't right for the right reasons, I would say. Yvette in San Jose says, I always always wondered what the canals were. Very interesting. You really want to learn a lot more about them, Evette, and have a good time. Read the book. This from Kerry, high from Adelaide, Australia. And thank you for discussing a book about my favorite space slash astronomical subject, Mars, the red planet. And it's true for so many of us, Carrie. Thank you for that as well. Let's talk a little bit more about the Martians and the concept of them. You show in the book, there are a lot of illustrations of some of the concepts that some of them pretty fanciful of what the Martians might have looked like, most of them still looking surprisingly human-like.

And this great quote from one woman, the Martians may be very fine intellectual people, remarked one Jane Jones of Binghamton, New York, but we do not and never shall like their looks. Most of the depictions of Martians were bizarre, if not hideous. They generally were bipeds. They generally, you know, had backbones. So it wasn't a lot of imagination there. But some of the common themes that you see, and some of these I would have been picked up in our stereotypical view of what aliens must look like.

And I think they derive from this period. So first of all, the eyes. Martians often were depicted with really big eyes. And why is that? Well, Mars is farther from the sun than we are, and therefore, dimmer. And so to take in more daylight, they must have big eyes. The Martians were generally taller than we are. They were tall and skinny because Mars has a lower force of gravity. So presumably, a creature could grow taller without its kind of infrastructure of bones and muscle being crushed under all that weight. The Martians tended to have big bald heads. Now, why is that? Well, that gets back to the idea I talked about that the Martians are more advanced than we are in evolution. So, if we evolve from apes

that had smaller heads and were hairy, and as we evolved, we lost much of our hair and our heads got bigger, well, the Martians probably have really big heads and they're bald. Simple as that. But one of the great mysteries that I had, you know, sometimes you'll see aliens

depicted with Antenny. And back in the 1960s, when I was a kid, there was this popular sitcom called My Favorite Martian. Ray Walston, one of my heroes. Ray Walston was, yeah, exactly. He played Uncle Martin, I guess, was his name. And he had crash landed. Right. He crash landed on Earth in his flying saucer from Mars. And he had Antenny that would come up. And you'll sometimes see even today aliens depicted with Antenny. Well, where did that come from? Well, actually, it was a friend of Percival Lowell's, Edward Sylvester Morse, who was a famous zoologist, who got very interested in the issue about a potential life on Mars. So he was thinking, well, what kind of creatures on Earth might be capable of over time evolving to live on a planet with very little air that's very

dry and cold? Now, they didn't realize just how little air there is on Mars back then, but they knew it had a pretty thin atmosphere. And what Morse said was, well, on earth, wherever you go, you find ants on the highest mountain tops in deserts. So then the idea came along that, well, maybe the Martians are ants or ant related, and they started to get Antenny in their depictions. You left out one characteristic that was pretty common, as people depicted the Martians, big, big lungs and ways to deal with the thin atmosphere.

which is also fascinating and... Right, big chest, big lungs. And sometimes there was also an idea that maybe they had a nose like a trunk. Yes. Because probably scents would not transmit very well in the thin atmosphere. So you'd need to get your nose to the scent

instead of the scent coming to your nose. So do you think that was it H.G. Wells, who with the War of the Worlds really introduced us to this concept of aliens who looked nothing like us, and also this thought that maybe they're not so benevolent. Maybe they'd want to get rid of us. Right.

Well, so the Martians in H.G. Wells is the War of the Worlds. People probably remember the tripods that marched across the earth, incinerating people with heat rays and grabbing people up so that the Martians could suck their blood, essentially. But the Martians themselves were not the tripods. The Martians were inside the tripods, and they were essentially just abrid. in a big sack of flesh with tentacles. And, you know, they look sort of like a jellyfish.

And that comes directly, again, from this idea that the Martians are what we will become in the future. And HG. Wells did this thought experiment, and he thought, well, over time, as we become more and more dependent on our technology to do the hard brute force work of things, we're just going to become brains with tentacles to control our technology.

So that's where his original Martians came from. original Martians came from. But the interesting thing was, H.G. Wells, a decade later, revisited the question about what Martians might be like. And at that point, he had met Percival Lowell and was pretty well convinced by Lowell's theory. So when he wrote about the Martians again in 1908, they were very different. Now they were bipeds with big eyes, and they were skinny and tall. He added wings because he thought that to deal with the wild temperature swings on Mars, maybe they needed feathers to insulate them. But he came around, in fact, to the idea that the Martians were probably these peaceful social beings and not the marauding monsters that he

first portrayed them as in the War of the Worlds. You know, I was one of those as a kid hearing about the War of the Worlds who thought that the tripods were the Martians. And I love to tell people, whenever I talk about Mars and bring up the curiosity and perseverance rovers, I love to point out the chem-cam and super cam devices on those spacecraft and say look at this. After all of those Martians who came to Earth

and tried to destroy us with their rayguns, we thought we should get there first. We sent lasers to Mars. So David Barron has much more to share with us after the break. Please stay with us. Greetings. Bill Nye here. CEO of the Planetary. society. We are a community of people dedicated to the scientific exploration of space or explorers

dedicated to making the future better for all humankind. Now as the world's largest independent space organization, we are rallying public support for space exploration, making sure that there is real funding, especially for NASA science. And we've had some success during this challenging year. But along with advocacy, we have our step initiative and our Neo Shoemaker grants. So please support us. We want to finish 2025 strong and keep that momentum going into 2026. So check us out at planetary.org slash planetary fund today. Thank you. Welcome back to Planetary Radio book club edition. I'm Matt Kaplan, continuing my conversation with science journalist and author David Barron. One of the fun things I learned and wrote about in my book is there is essentially a sequel

to the War of the Worlds. It was not written by H.G. Wells. It was written by Garrett P. Service, who was a famous science writer at the time. But after the Martians came and tried to conquer the Earth, the sequel, which is called Edison's Conquest of Mars, is the story of Thomas Edison and humanity going to Mars to get it to revenge and essentially to destroy the canal system. The War of the World is really a brilliant book that if you've never read it, I highly recommend. Edison's Conquest of Mars is pretty silly.

It's not great literature, but it's fun to think about in that time how people imagine getting their revenge on the Martians. And Service is another one of those great characters who comes up repeatedly in the book. And there is a great illustration too, I think, from that book, Edison's Conquest of Mars in the book. So much there to write. home about from Mars. Carrie says, that's hilarious that the Martians were otherized when people didn't know what they looked like. That seems so indicative of how some people are treated just because they are different from the majority of the population surrounding them. Gee, Carrie, you think that has any relevance for civilizations today, for our culture today? From Kareem, I've recently seen

online articles saying Mars had agent biosignatures. What does that mean? What do you think? Well, maybe not so much a one for this conversation, Karim, but you're right, of course. Go to planetary.org where my colleague, Asa Stahl, has written extensively about those recent results from perseverance, where it looks like, I mean, they've had the peer review, and nobody's been able to come up with an explanation for these little spots in this spot in this river delta on Mars for how they might have been generated without something living without biology. So, I think there's every reason to believe there may once have been life on Mars. These recent findings are really interesting. But we have to remember, I mean, one of the lessons of Percival Lowell is he went

into his study of Mars looking for life. That was his goal. He was looking for that evidence. He found it and he convinced himself that it was real. Again, I'm totally in favor of what NASA is doing and perseverance and all that. But keep in mind, perseverance was sent to Mars to look for signs of life. We sent it to a part of Mars, specifically where we thought there may be signs of life. Now we found what looks like signs of life. We have to be careful that we're not just finding what we want to find. But what we need to do, of course, is get that rock sample back to Earth for a closer scrutiny. Absolutely. That sample return is such a high priority for all of us at the Planetary Society. He was clearly a very persuasive speaker. I mean, he really was really

was a great spokesperson for his incorrect position, right? I mean, he did these lectures that were well attended and more. Oh, absolutely. No, I mean, that, you know, he was, so here he was this eloquent, persuasive man who came from, you know, one of the most respected families in the United States. The Lowell's of Massachusetts were not only wealthy. They made their fortune in textiles. The city of Lowell, Massachusetts is named after them. But they were highly philanthropic. You know, the Lowell's were very much involved in Harvard University and the founding of MIT. The founding editor of the Atlantic Monthly was a Lowell. So Lowell came from this long line. So that gave him respect. But he, yeah, I mean, his talks would be basically sold out crowds.

His speaking and his writing to today's year seems a little dated and stilted. But clearly for that time, it really grabbed people. I mean, people would talk about, You know, of course, there is no film of him. I don't know what he actually sounded like. But people would talk about just what a winning personality he had. He had a charm when he was on the stage. He loved puns. He could be very annoying with his puns, I might say.

But he thought he was humorous, and people found him humorous. And that contributed to the attraction of his ideas. So very persuasive, but not really a very stable personality. Again, I clearly never met him. It can be hard to really understand a person's personality from the distance of over 100 years. But, I mean, I dare say I've read just about everything he wrote that's been published, and I've read a heck of a lot of stuff that he wrote that was not published, his personal correspondence, his business correspondence.

There's one extant diary of his that's at Harvard University. I know he wrote other diaries. Those apparently have been destroyed over the years. unfortunately. But it's clear that he clearly was an egoist. I think he had a fragile personality. He really did not handle criticism well. And he probably was bipolar. And I say this is not just my own opinion, but William Sheehan, who's written many wonderful books on the history of astronomy and has written very thoughtfully about Percival Lowell, and I can count as a friend, is a trained psychiatrist. He worked as a psychiatrist for many years. And he's the one who has pointed out

that based on his behavior, he thinks that Percival Loew was bipolar. He would have these periods of just manic, creative activity, and then these deep, deep depressions. I mean, he really was sidelined by depression during a couple of very long periods in the 1890s and then again in the 19-teens. Yeah, so he was, you know, as are we all, a complex character. I will only mention in passing that if you want to hear William Sheehan, go to Planet Planetary.org and use the Planetary Radio search engine because William Sheehan was a guest of mine a couple of times on Planetary Radio. Fascinating man in all the ways that you've just talked about. Another fellow who we've mentioned, who is also a major character in the book, is Nicola Tesla. You know, you talked about this era, the Gilded Age and into the early 20th century as being difficult, a lot of challenges, a lot of problems. Also, you also mention the sort of techno enthusiasm that was rampant in this period,

you know, Edison turning out inventions and all of the other advances that were underway. And Tesla seems to have fit right into that. And, of course, he picked up on the whole Mars craze. It just seems to be a perfect fit for that age. Oh, it was an astonishing time. I mean, think about it. The modern bicycle came along in like 1890. before, right? Before that, there were those penny farthings with the crazy giant wheel

on the little wheel. So first you have the, you know, the bicycle as we know it, and there was a whole bicycle craze. Then automobiles come along a few years later, and before you know it, the Wright brothers, and we're flying, right? How astonishing these major advances in transportation in such a short time. Meanwhile, x-rays are discovered in the 1890s, radio waves are discovered there's this whole sense that there are these mysterious forces out there so yeah it was a time when anything seemed possible and tesla was of course one of the important inventors of that time he was a true genius he's the the person who was responsible for our modern system of electrical power generation and distribution he famously had that battle of the currents against

thomas edison who thought direct current was the answer and tesla said no it's alternating and current. So Tesla was a genius. Tesla was a celebrity. Tesla was also a very odd man. And I think he must have loved coming across as this sort of mystical presence. He dressed very finely and he spoke very eloquently. And he would say strange things. After he worked successfully on how to distribute power and send electrical signals through wires, he got interested in how to do that wirelessly. Again, what today we would call radio, and back then it was just called wireless

or wireless telegraphy. The idea was to transmit Morse code through the air. And this is just when Marconi, of course, was getting into it as well. Well, Tesla, in 1890, moved from New York to Colorado for the better part of a year to do some important studies. He went to Colorado Springs and set up

an experimental laboratory specifically to study how electricity can be transmitted through the earth and the atmosphere. Again, there was no radio at that time. No one was transmitting, but he would listen on his radio receiver to natural sound, so like lightning, would create clicks and pops in his radio receiver.

And one night, he was alone in his laboratory, and he started to hear this strange signal that came in triplets. It was just sort of this very quiet, click, click, click, click, click, click, that repeated over and over again, and he pondered what this could be. From some source on Earth, could the Sun be doing this? And eventually he decided,

this must be Percival Lowell's Martians, sending a signal to Earth, shouting hello. So Tesla sat on the news for about a year and a half, and it was at the very dawn of the 20th century. So there was a debate about exactly when the 20th century began, was it? 1900 or 1901 well the answer is 1901 and so it was new year's eve right before the beginning of 1901 there was celebrations about the beginning of the 20th century the red cross decided to

hold a bunch of what they called watch meetings they were these basically celebrations and to bring in the new century across the country as fundraisers and they asked about a hundred celebrities across the globe like queen victoria and mark twain to write in about, just a very short note about the big developments of the 19th century and what they foresaw coming in the 20th century. Well, Tesla was asked to write one of these notes, and he used that opportunity to say that he had received this signal from another world. So as the 20th century began, January 1st, this new century, people woke up to the news

that Mars was sending a signal to Earth. And that just propelled this Mars craziness to a whole new level. It wasn't just Lowell. Now it was Tesla. And the Martians were calling. And the Martians started to show up in vaudeville skits and Broadway plays and Tin Pan Alley's songs. They were in the comics and the newspapers. And they showed up in advertising.

And here we go. Here is one of those. I could not resist including this. Pairs soap. Send up some. Peers So, the first message from Mars, as they wire down to us. As you know, David, I said to you when we were talking yesterday, this reminds me so much of that joke about the golden record that went out on the Voyager spacecraft. And, you know, the joke is that the SETI scientists receive

the first message from extraterrestrials. And they decoded. And what does it say? Send more Chuck Barry. But it really became such a cultural phenomenon with Tesla and Lowell and others pushing it hard. Right. And again, you know, the newspapers, so we already talked about the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal that really came on board a few years later. But in this era, the so-called yellow press, the tabloid press, particularly William Randolph Hearst's newspapers that loved anything that was sensational. They would just plaster the Mars News and headlines across the front page. Tesla is admired by a lot of people today, almost as a cult figure. Right. I mean, you don't see a lot of T-shirts with Percival Lowell on them. But Tesla's

everywhere. He was obviously as good as self-promoter, maybe better than Lowell was, and he's still viewed by so many as a visionary, but such an interesting observation in the book, you said that The word visionary, which was also applied to Tesla and to Lowell back then, didn't have the sort of benevolent connotations that we now, that we give it, the admirable connotations. Right. No, back then, visionary was a pejorative. It meant someone who saw visions who could, had trouble separating imagination from reality. Tesla was, was criticized as a visionary, whereas Thomas Edison was a practical man who actually

had ideas, practical ideas, brought them to fruition. Tesla was kind of more of a poet. He was a dreamer. And I actually think that that's true. I mean, Tesla was, as I say, brilliant. And what he did for electrical power generation and distribution was critically important. But he did not have Edison's common sense, and he certainly didn't have Edison's business sense. And that was part of his downfall. He would dream up these ideas, but he wouldn't really turn the them into anything practical in a short enough time that you could get your money back. And so he had these investors, including J.P. Morgan, who were plowing money into his inventions. And then they kind of gave up on him as, again, a visionary, a dreamer, but not someone who could be counted on

to bring something out that people really wanted. You mentioned yellow journalism of that era, which has made a comeback. I'm so struck by the role of the media in all this, which you also document very well, by which I mean newspapers, of course, because what else did they have at the time? They weren't lucky enough to have TikTok, he said sarcastically. Really, I wonder if Lowell and Tesla, for that matter, would have achieved a tenth of the notoriety they did without particularly the so-called yellow journalism that was so popular at the time. I mean, you mentioned Hearst and his papers. Right, and Pulitzer, too. I mean, think of Joseph Pulitzer is, I mean, because the Pulitzer Prize is for really good journalism,

Pulitzer was known for yellow journalism. He figured out how to get people to buy his papers by giving them what they wanted, the kind of more lurid news and sensationalistic news. Clearly, I mean, there were so many interesting forces that came together to create this Mars craze at that time. And that's, you know, that's part of why this book took so long to write. This was a seven-year project because in the end I had to know not only about the science and all these people and on the technology at the time and the politics at the time, but I had to know about the journalism at the time and how it developed and which newspapers were considered trustworthy and which weren't but the yellow press coming along when it did very much propelled it. I don't know whether

perhaps Lowe would have still gotten the same amount of attention eventually because he, you know, He was writing, say, for the Atlantic Monthly and other more highbrow publications about what he was seeing on Mars. But certainly, certainly what was happening in the mainstream media was a huge part of what propelled it at that time. Because you've brought it up, I'd love for you to say a little bit more about how much of your life became dominated for all those years by doing the research that resulted in this book. it really is a monumental achievement, in addition to just being fun to read. It's just incredible the amount of detail that you found and all these documents and sources that had never been written about before. I mean, I'm embarrassed to say this was my full-time job for seven years.

This is all I did. I didn't expect it would take that long, but the deeper I got into it, the more interesting it was, the more questions I had, the more avenues I wanted to go down. And the more time I spent on it, the more I was not going to cut corners, you know, having gone this far into it, I wanted to find everything I could that was relevant and tell the story as best I could. I don't regret that it took that long. It was a worthwhile way to spend my time.

I really enjoyed learning about this period in history and learning about these individuals and the treasure hunt that is doing historical research. But, yeah, writing a book like this, at least for me, takes a lot of work. You should not feel any embarrassment, only pride. What was the position you had at the Library of Congress, which came along and that's the right time? Yeah, so that helped. I mean, it's very hard to get support to write a book, and I was really fortunate for a portion of my time writing the book to be given probably the most, the fanciest title that anyone could have, which I was the chair in astrobiology at the Library of Congress. It sounds fancier than it is.

It's basically like a fellowship for scholars. The Library of Congress has a center for scholars that brings in professors and graduate students and independent writers for a period of time in residence at the Library of Congress who will be benefited by having access to the collections there. And there is one specific position called the Baruchas Blumberg, NASA Library of Congress chair in Astroch. biology, funded by NASA, to support research into the broader cultural aspects of astrobiology, of looking for life in the universe. When I started writing the book, I had no idea that this position existed, but it was almost written for this kind of project. And so I applied for it, and I was selected as one of the chairs.

I would say there now have been 12 chairs in astrobiology at the Library of Congress. And a couple of weeks ago, we were all brought to Washington for our first reunion, and we got to meet each other. It was a really interesting discussion. Again, these are a few are scientists, but primarily it's historians and writers and others who look at astrobiology from all sorts of different angles. I know a couple of other folks. You're in very, very good company. Absolutely. No, I'm just tickle myself that I was able to get that position.

Tesla, even with the support, at least at first from the likes of J.P. Morgan, never got to complete his transmitter to talk back to the people on Mars and kind of came to an ignoble end. It all kind of crumbled for Lowell as well toward the end, right? I mean, talk about how Lowell, who was literally on top of two worlds for a long time, came to be someone who was really, I think kind of pitied in some... Yeah, exactly. Well, so again, started in the 1890s, the interesting theory he had about these lines on Mars being irrigation canals. The question arose, well, we're relying on Lowell's maps.

He draws them of these straight lines that all seem to intersect at these common points. But how can we trust that what he's seeing is real, that what he's drawn is what he accurately, what he saw? Lowell then decided the way to prove that the canals were real was to develop an ability to photograph them. And so that became his overriding pursuit, like from 1903 to 1907. He and his assistants developed a way to take tiny little photographs of Mars where you could see surface features.

He claimed they showed the canals. Others didn't see the canals. But actually having those photos, people started to think, well, maybe Lowell was right. And so by 1907, when Mars was in opposition, it made a very close approach to Earth. Lowell sent this expedition to Chile to take over 10,000 photographs of Mars that supposedly proved that the canals were real. And that's why at the end of 1907, the Wall Street Journal said there was now proof of life on Mars. And so by 1908, I would say that was 1908 and 1909 were really the peak of Lowell's fame and influence.

when he was now being hailed as someone who really had discovered this amazing civilization on the planet next door. Well, 1909 was another year when Mars was going to make a very close approach to Earth. And there was an astronomer in Europe, Eugene Michel Antoniati, who had studied Mars quite a bit in the past. In fact, he worked for Camille Flamarian in France. He had, Antoniotti had mapped the canals on Mars. He saw the canals. He drew them. But he started to wonder himself if maybe his eye was playing tricks on him. And in 1909, Antoniotti was able to get access to the observatory at Moudon outside of Paris, which at the time had the largest telescope in Europe.

And on a night when Mars was making its closest approach, when the skies over Paris were not only clear but incredibly still, Antoniati looked through the telescope and had just this crystal view of Mars, just stable in his telescope. And this man who had drawn the canals, who knew where the canals were supposed to be, looked for them and they weren't there. Now when he had the best view of Mars ever,

what looked like straight lines were just naturalistic features on Mars, areas of stippling or shading or kind of wavy things on Mars, not straight lines. And so Antoniati, I mean, for him, this was a revelation. I mean, he now saw Mars as it truly was, and he took it upon himself to bring Lowell down. And it's interesting, the two men were quite similar. They were both amateurs, but really talented amateurs who had dedicated a lot of time to Mars. They were both very persuasive and articulate and stubborn, but also Antoniotti was an extremely good artist.

He trained as an artist, and his sketches of Mars are just things of beautiful. and he was able to sketch the naturalistic features saw on Mars. And at the same time, the Mount Wilson Observatory in California had opened, and it was now taking some photographs of Mars that seemed even better than the ones that Lowell had produced. And together, the photographs at Antoniotti's drawings pretty well convinced the astronomical community that the lines really weren't there.

And so astronomers pretty well by 1910 saw Lowell as now a crank, who, again, Lowell was just continued to dig in his heels. But the astronomers now increasingly dismissed him as just a crazy, increasingly old man. And it's very sad that that's what happened. But yeah, by the time he died in 1916, he really was seen as kind of delusional. And I think he was. But very interestingly, the obituaries of Lowell were very forgiving.

They acknowledged that his science was wrong. But they still, they said that he inspired. the public's imagination and got people to think about outer space and to get excited about the possibilities of life on other worlds and that is lowell's very positive legacy you know he got the science wrong but he really got people excited about outer space it was lowell's i mean this period that i write about this mars craze at the turn of the last century is what inspired modern science fiction you probably know about the hugo awards these big awards in science fiction, named after Hugo Gernsback,

who's considered the father of modern science fiction. He was an early writer, and more importantly, an editor of science fiction. Hugo Gernsback became a science fiction fanatic and pioneer because he read Percival Lowell's writings when he was a boy and dreamed of life on Mars. I mean, you can read the similar stories that other people tell. Robert H. Goddard, the father of American rocketry, decided to devote to devote his life to figuring out how we could go to outer space, because when he was a kid, he read H.G. Wells as the War of the Worlds

and that crazy sequel, Edison's Conquest of Mars. And he thought, well, I wonder if we can go to Mars. So again, this period of craziness that Percival Lowell was largely responsible for actually laid the early groundwork for science fiction and for the space age itself. Werner von Braun, and I don't mention this in my book, But Werner von Braun, who was building rockets for the Nazis before he came and built them for NASA, he too became a rocket scientist because when he was a kid in Germany, he read science fiction about Mars that was also based on Lowell's vision of a canal building Martian civilization. So you find all these interesting threads from that bizarre period of Mars insanity to where we

are today in terms of our ideas about outer space and our ability to go there. I don't want to leave out Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Carter and a Princess of Mars, which, of course, inspired Ray Bradbury. And Ray Bradbury was around to his great disappointment to see what Mars really was like when... And Edgar Rice Burroughs books about Barsoom, which is, of course, what the Martians call their own planet in his books, also inspired Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan, when he was an eight-year-old boy, would go out into a field with his... arms outstretched and hope that he would be transported to Mars the way John Carter was in those Edgar Rice Burroughs books. And he decided if he couldn't get there that way, he would go there by working out with spacecraft that could go there for us. The great current contemporary science

fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, who wrote the Mars trilogy, Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, told me once, and I'm sure he's told other people how he bought a small piece of a Mars meteorite climbed up on the roof of his house and ate it. No. Yes. And because he figured that some portion, some small number of molecules of Mars are now incorporated into his body.

Oh, what a riot. So the romance of Mars, it continues. Here's a quote from Carl Sagan that you include at the end of the book. Even if all Lowell's conclusions about Mars, including the existence of the fabled canals, turned out to be bankrupt, Sagan wrote forgivingly. His depiction of the planet had at least this virtue. It aroused generations of eight-year-olds, myself among them,

to consider the exploration of the planets as a real possibility to wonder if we ourselves might one day voyage to Mars. Just perfect, as so much of what Sagan wrote was. Isn't it interesting that there are still people on this planet, it with all of the science and all of the terrific observations we're now able to make of Mars, who still see things on Mars that are not actually there, faces and otherwise. Yeah, right. I mean, that face that Viking Orbiter found in 1976.

I mean, it does look sort of like a face, but obviously, it just was a natural mesa that was lit by the sun in a certain way that gave it eyes on the mouth. But, yeah, so, I mean, I do get questions. as I've been out promoting my book from people who ask whether there might once have been an ancient civilization on Mars. Obviously, I can't rule it out. I would find it highly unlikely, but I think that all comes from that face on Mars. Yeah, no doubt. A couple of last minute comments.

David said, I came in late. Did you say what it was that Tesla heard in those radio triplet beats? Yes, David did a great, this David, David Barron, our guest, did a great impression of them. And Tesla believed they were coming from the Martians who were transmitting to Earth. That's what he believed, right? But the question is, what did he actually hear? And I don't know. You know, there have been, so some people have speculated, well, one author has speculated,

maybe he heard Marconi experimenting with radio in Europe. Because Barconi was sending out these triplets of basically dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, which is an S in Morse code. But I don't believe it in the least because in 1899, I mean, Marconi signals, I think, would have been much too weak to reach Colorado. I don't think it's that. There have been theories that it may have been, I think it's, I forget if it's Jupiter or Saturn, that its magnetic field may be sending out some pulses in triplets.

But I don't know enough to judge if that's realistic. My guess is it's another example, like the canals, of the human brain. brains, propensity to see patterns where there are none. And, you know, in any random sequence of numbers, eventually you'll see a pattern, even though it actually is random. And I would think sitting alone in a laboratory at night, listening to some very faint signal coming across his radio receiver, he may, for a time, have heard what sounded like triplets being repeated, but it may just have been random.

Who knows, maybe it was coming from Alpha Centauri. Yeah, right. You've kind of stated this, but I'll give you one more opportunity to just tell us where you're left with as you look back at Percival Lowell and this entire period. I went into the book thinking that I was writing a cautionary tale. I mean, I learned about the Canals on Mars from Carl Sagan. You know, I was in high school when his Cosmos series went on people. And that's where I first learned about the canals and about Percival Lowe. So it's always been in the back of my head as this story of how easy it is to fool ourselves.

And I thought that that was a lesson that was important today, and it certainly is. But it was the deeper I got into the story, the more I saw the inspirational aspects as well. And I think it's both. It's both a cautionary tale and an inspirational tale. Imagination is incredibly important in science. Science is all about coming up against dead ends and wondering, well, what if we can push through? What's on the other side? Or finding mysteries and trying to put the pieces together.

And imagination is extraordinarily important to try to figure out how the pieces fit. And Lowell was very good at the imagination part. But we also need the more rational part and the data collection part and the objectivity part and peer review part in the end. think, again, I think it is both a cautionary tale and an inspiring tale. And that's, you know, if I'm going to write a book, it sure as hell better be a complex story. I mean, you don't want something that's simplistic if you're going to spend seven years writing it and we want people to go through the journey of reading it as well. Yeah, science is complicated. Astronomy's complicated and human beings sure the hell are complicated. And I think it's a story about all those

things. It is a rich and beautifully woven tale of this amazing time in American history, the Martians, the true story of an alien craze that captured turn of the century America by our guest, David Barron. I want to say, folks, if you've read the book, you probably also got to see his extensive list of sources at the end of the book. If you have not read the book, well, first of all, pick it up and read it. it and don't miss that section because it is also fascinating and full of stuff that we could have continued this conversation talking about. But David, I want to be able to let you go now. I'm just going to use your closing line from the book. He lit the fire of Mars passion that has

burned through the ages from generation to generation and brain to brain from Lowell to Burroughs, Burroughs to Sagan, Sagan to me. May your book help inspire the future explorers of the red planet, David. It ain't going to hurt. Well, thank you, Matt. It's pleasure to talk to you again, and I hope the Planetary Society will continue its great work to get us to Mars before too long. Thank you, David. David Barron's The Martians, the true story of an alien craze that captured turn-of-the-century America, is published by LiveRite. Radio is a production of the Planetary Society.

Our associate producers are Ray Palletta and Mark Hilverda. Post-production is by Andrew Lucas. The Society's member community is led by Amber Trujillo. And the producer and host of Planetary Radio is Sarah Al-Ale-Hmed. I'm at Kaplan, at Astra. Thank you.