Mars has always been the subject of countless movies and books on extra-terrestrial life. But do you know what gave rise to this sci-fi trend? We have a simple translation mistake and an optical illusion to thank for that!
In 1877, about the same time when Asaph Hall was trying to find the Martian moons, an Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, was trying to map the Martian surface. He carefully marked the network of crisscrossing lines he saw through his telescope, and called them canali, Italian for “grooves.” But when it got translated to English, canali became “canals.” This made many think that Mars has, or once had residents intelligent enough to design and construct waterways!
Among them was a wealthy American astronomer, Percival Lowell. He established an observatory called the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, U.S.A, and dedicated around 15 years of his life to the study of these Martian canals. He also published many of his theories about Mars and life on the Red Planet (such as how Martians had built canals to transport melt water from the poles to water dry areas on the equator) which also shaped popular imagination. Though a few other astronomers too saw these “canals,”” many more did not, and this became a controversy of “astronomical” proportions! Today, we know that the lines Schiaparelli, Lowell and others saw were just optical illusions seen through low-power telescopes working at their limits of magnification.
Picture Credit : Google
