Giovanni Schiaparelli mapped Mars in 1877 while the planet was unusually close to Earth. Schiaparelli, who was color-blind, perceived geometric outlines and reported shapes like oceans and long, straight lines across the surface. He described the lines as sometimes faint, other times sharply marked, and named them canali, or channels. English speakers rendered the term as canals. About fifteen years later Percival Lowell embraced the canals idea, built an observatory, hired astronomers, and promoted the interpretation that the lines were an extensive irrigation network engineered to sustain Martian inhabitants, implying deliberate intelligent design.
In 1877, Giovanni Schiaparelli, an Italian astronomer (and uncle of the fashion icon Elsa), started making a map of the surface of Mars, which was then at one of the closest points to Earth in its orbit. Schiaparelli was color-blind, but this affliction may have increased his ability to see geometric outlines, and what he observed on Mars was extraordinary: not only shapes that resembled oceans but long, straight lines between them.
Schiaparelli wasn't sure what they represented, but he dubbed them "channels," or, in Italian, canali. In the Anglophone world, they soon became "canals." About fifteen years later, a Boston Brahmin named Percival Lowell fell under the spell of Schiaparelli's "canals." Born in 1855, Lowell had spent his twenties and thirties touring Japan and Korea, which had just opened up to the West, and writing about his experiences, but in the eighteen-nineties he turned his attention-and considerable means-toward the cosmos.
In 1895, he would assert, in a series of lectures, that the lines on the planet's surface were proof of a highly sophisticated irrigation system, feeding oases where the inhabitants of Mars would tend crops to survive an otherwise hostile environment; the system was suggestive of "a mind of no mean order," Lowell said, one of "considerably more comprehensiveness than that which presides over the various departments of our own public works."
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