Pun Salad

A good review in the WSJ put this book by David Baron on my get-at-library list. It's easy to write off our modern age as one where the unwashed masses believe in utter claptrap, but guess what? The author, David Baron, demonstrates that back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, plenty of Americans got hooked into believing in Martians. And many of those people were well-washed.

Leading the way were the "amateur" astronomers of the day. (By our lights, most scientists back then were amateurs, although very enthusiastic.) The most famous was Percival Lowell, one of the immensely wealthy mill-owning Lowells of Boston. Percival wasn't that interested in mills, but used his fortune to build telescopes and (eventually) observatories, and his attention was concentrated on Mars.

And he reported some astounding news: Mars was an arid, dying, planet, but it had polar icecaps. And a vast network of canals, clearly meant to carry runoff water from those icecaps down to oases at lower latitudes. Clearly, the inhabitants of Mars had built them as a desperate measure to survive.

Although there were critics of this scenario, the public was swept up by Lowell's certainty. Nicola Tesla was also a True Believer, and made serious efforts to communicate with the Martians, either by huge reflecting mirrors or a even bigger radio antenna. H.G. Wells also got in on the craze with (you may have heard) his novel War of the Worlds.

But by the early 1900s, the craze was in decline. Although Lowell remained a believer in his fantasy until he died in 1916, he was increasingly isolated and depressed. (Tesla, as you might know, was even crazier, developing an (um) eccentric attachment to a white New York pigeon that he claimed visited him daily.)

Baron does a good job of getting into Lowell's head. Occasionally his prose gets purple and (perhaps) overly speculative, but that's OK.