Mapping the Mars Canal Mania: Cartographic Projection and the Creation of a Popular Icon

Author: MariaLane, K. D.

Source: Imago Mundi: The International Journal for the History of Cartography, Volume 58, Number 2, July 2006 , pp. 198-211(14)

Publisher: Routledge, part of the Taylor & Francis Group

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Abstract:

Dr Maria Lane is an assistant instructor in the Department of Geography and the Environment, University of Texas at Austin.At the turn of the twentieth century, a popular mania developed around the idea that Mars was inhabited by intelligent beings. This obsession was originally based in the science of the time, but it outlasted astronomers' certainty regarding the red planet's conditions of habitability. Cartography was vital to the popular construction of Mars as an inhabited world and created a powerful landscape icon that differed significantly from the observations of astronomers. Acceptance of a Martian civilization began to wane only when cartography's status as an objective representational format was weakened by new photographic technology in the early 1900s. Although the processes and formats of cartography are rarely considered primary factors in the Mars mania, they were integral to the origin, development and expiration of the conceptualization of Mars as a world that was possibly inhabited.

Keywords: astronomical cartography; planetary photography; science popularization; Mars; Martian canals; Giovanni Schiaparelli; Nathaniel Green; Percival Lowell; Eugène Antoniadi

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03085690600687255

Publication date: 2006-07-01