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exceedingly low and found the lack of water compelling evidence that there could be no civilization on the planet.
    The impact of Lowell’s advocacy can be measured in many ways, but perhaps the strongest is the appearance of stories of Martian civilization in fiction. Possibly the first occurrence would be H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel War of the Worlds . During the late 1880s, Wells was trained as a science teacher, and he had written a biology textbook. However, in 1894 he joined the scientific journal Nature as a reviewer. Much of his writing served to translate the highly technical innovations of the Victorian era into terms familiar to the educated lay reader. His essay Intelligence on Mars , published in 1896 in the Saturday Review , speculated about life on Mars and how the inhabitants would cope with what he considered to be an older planet. Much of the article, including his conjecture that the Martians might move to another planet to survive, was found in his famous fictional work The War of the Worlds . He even incorporates the reports of a flash of light observed on Mars by an astronomer in 1894 (and published in the August issue of Nature ) as the start of the book. As will be detailed in chapter 3 , The War of the Worlds describes the invasion of Earth by Martians and their subsequent defeat by Earth microbes.
    Lowell is a central figure to the excitement about Martian intelligence, but he was neither the originator of the idea, nor did he resolve it. He was merely a true believer, articulate and enthusiastic, who excelled at communicating his vision. Indeed, Lowell never did really give up his beliefs, even when they were ruled out by better measurements.
    The year 1909 was when there was another particularly favorable opposition for Mars and when Martian canals were ruled out, at least as far as the scientific community was concerned. The scientist who dashed the dreams of those who hoped it had been proven that mankind was not alone in the universe was Eugene Antoniadi, a Greek astronomer who gained some fame in later life as a scholar of ancient Greek and Egyptian astronomy. That Antoniadi was the one who resolved the debate came with some irony, as he worked at Flammarion’s observatory in 1894 and published his results in the journal of the French Astronomical Society, which Flammarion began. But such is the small world of professional astronomy.
    Antoniadi was able to see dark, irregularly shaped spots on the surface of Mars, but he concluded definitively that the canals themselves were “an optical illusion.” His result made it to the United States, where a new class of telescopes was coming online, the big reflectors. The 60-inch reflector on Mount Wilson was turned to Mars, and the director wrote to Antoniadi, saying, “I am thus inclined to agree with you in your opinion … that the so-called ‘canals’ of Schiaparelli are made up of small irregular dark regions.” Antoniadi continuedto observe Mars, writing his own book La planète Mars in 1930. But in 1909 the astronomical world moved on.
    As is often the case in these situations, there were true believers who refused to accept the new conclusions. Until his death in 1916, Lowell maintained that those who failed to see the canals were mistaken and doing sloppy work. Further, he still had the ear of many of the leaders in the popular media. For instance, in the August 27, 1911, issue of the New York Times Sunday magazine, a splashy article entitled “Martians Build Two Immense Canals in Two Years” described two canals, each a thousand miles long and 20 miles wide that had appeared on the Martian surface. The possibility that these were natural features was ruled out in the article.
    The public was not as quick to give up on Martian canals as was the scientific community. First, they were not as close to the data as the astronomers were and, second, they had received a steady barrage of stories, speculating on Martian culture and how the