In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli turned his telescope to Mars and saw signs of a potentially lush world. He would publish his observations of what he believed to be “seas” and “continents” on the Martian surface. He also described channels or canali in Italian.

Schiaparelli’s canali was then translated into the English canals, which implied construction by intelligent inhabitants. He mused about the possibility in his 1893 journals, in which he describes how the other planets are too close to the sun or too far away to harbor life.

American astronomer Percival Lowell read these journals, and pushed the idea even further, writing in his 1908 book “Mars as the Abode of Life” that a Martian civilization built these “canals” from the poles to the equatorial regions to transport water.

Lowell correctly anticipated that his scientific colleagues would be reluctant “to admit the possibility of peers” inhabiting other planets. But the public loved the idea, and his lectures were often packed. Lowell himself was so taken with the theory that he built an entire observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and spent years observing Mars and mapping its surface.

in 1899, Serbian-American engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla announced that he may have received a signal from Mars. The signal was in the form of cosmic radio waves picked up by his instruments, although later research would reveal they were radio waves emitted by interstellar gas clouds.

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