Did you hear that people once thought mars had canals on it? Yeah, wild. Here's a brief timeline for you to laugh at, and a wikipedia link for you to find more extensive sources on the topic.
1877: Canal controversy starts with Giovanni Schiaparelli and his reported sightings of canals through an 8 inch telescope
1886/1888: Henri Perrotin and Louis Thollen confirm these signings1894: Lowell publishes his theory of an intelligence species on mars that build the canals.
Meanwhile, William Harkness uses a 26 inch telescope and reports no canals of any sort. That same year, Schiaparelli reports that the canals actually DOUBLED in number.
Pickering, a brother to the then director of the Harvard College Observatory, and a colleague suggests that said canals were actually strips of vegetation. Theories float around that Mars has a atmosphere similar to Earth. Spectroscopy readings even match this theory. It’s not till later that a fellow by the last name of Antoniadio starts his own observations and finds out that the spectroscopy readings of Mars were illusory; it was actually the Earth’s light reflecting on Mars (the same problem comes up when you do a spectroscopy reading of Earth’s moon). In his research, Antoniadio sees that these major players in the canal theory are constantly changing their stories depending on who they talk to. He does his own viewings of Mars with a 33 inch telescope and of course finds no canals. He publishes all this work, and thus ends the canal hypothesis. A very weird incident in 1924 arises when a then learned and prestigious astronomer looks again at mars and says he too sees the canals. But, publically the hype is over with.
Wikipedia article on Martian Canals.
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