"In We Probably Aren't Alone, Sarah Scoles describes how Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli's 1877 observation of apparent channels or grooves on Mars had led to a widespread belief that the planet was home to canal-digging civilizations thanks to a mistranslation. Scoles notes that this idea began to lose its sparkle in 1909, when French astronomer Eugene Antoniadi found that the lines Schiaparelli saw were an optical illusion. The same finding as Antoniadi's was made three decades earlier."
"In it, I point out that, in 1877, the same year as Schiaparelli's claim, amateur astronomer and professional artist Nathaniel Everett Green took advantage of the transparency of the Madeira air to observe Mars, as he wrote in the Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1879. He noted that it would be difficult to exaggerate the keen map-like appearance of the planet, which allowed him to conclude that the remarkable dark canals ... of Professor Schiaparelli ... certainly were invisible at Madeira."
Giovanni Schiaparelli reported apparent channels or grooves on Mars in 1877 that, due to a mistranslation of 'canali' as 'canals', stimulated belief in canal-digging civilizations. Eugene Antoniadi demonstrated in 1909 that the lines were optical illusions, although the same conclusion had been reached three decades earlier. Nathaniel Everett Green observed Mars from Madeira in 1877 and recorded a keen, map-like planetary appearance that led him to find Schiaparelli's remarkable dark canals invisible from Madeira. Green attributed Schiaparelli's markings to optical illusion. An argument for extraterrestrial life based on an infinite universe implies many other planets must exist.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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