{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Books & Looks","title":"The Martian Craze: How Percival Lowell Created Canals on Mars | #131","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2854,"description":"Were the Martian canals real? For decades, some of the world's most respected astronomers and newspapers answered with a resounding YES. But how did a simple misunderstanding spiral into a global belief in an advanced, dying civilization on the Red Planet? This episode unwraps the incredible story of the turn-of-the-century Martian craze, a period when fact and fiction blurred, and humanity collectively looked to the stars, convinced someone was looking back. We explore how this mania began, who its biggest champions were, and how the idea of intelligent Martians shaped science and culture forever.This deep dive into the history of our obsession with Mars is guided by acclaimed author David Baron, whose book \"The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America\" chronicles this fascinating era. We begin with the story's surprising European origins, specifically with Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli and his 1877 observations of \"canali\" on the Martian surface. A critical mistranslation of Giovanni Schiaparelli canali (Italian for \"channels\") into \"canals\" in English ignited the public imagination with the possibility of artificial structures. This idea was popularized by French astronomer and author Camille Flammarion, but it was an American who would become the theory's most fervent and influential advocate: Percival Lowell.Born into a wealthy Boston family, Percival Lowell dedicated his fortune and his life to proving the existence of an intelligent Martian race. We detail the astonishingly complex Percival Lowell Mars theory, which proposed that Mars was an old, drying planet and its inhabitants had built a planet-wide irrigation system—the Martian canals—to channel water from the polar ice caps to their desert cities. To prove it, Lowell founded the iconic Lowell Observatory in Arizona and even funded a massive expedition to Chile to capture the first-ever photographs of the canals, which he presented as undeniable...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/oq8pfCVOaRFaQ_5sLfAhAv0t-iFX8G7c43zH1_aXC78/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9mMjYy/Y2ExYzZkODRjNWVk/MDkxZjk4MGNiNzE2/Y2ZkYi5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}