Percival Lowell was convinced that, through his telescope on "Mars Hill" in Flagstaff, Arizona, he had seen a network of canals on Mars. He interpreted this network as a heroic fight by Martians for survival. When Lowell revealed his findings and interpretations to the world in his book, Mars, the publisher couldn't get enough copies into print. The unequivocal statement that there was intelligent life elsewhere in the solar system, together with Lowell's mythic scenario of a dying race, left readers spellbound.
Amateur astronomy exploded and telescope sales skyrocketed. People all over the world sat in their backyards squinting through spy glasses. Many saw strange things such as SOS light signals from the Martians and the Hebrew words for the Almighty spelled in the dark markings on the planet's surface. Ideas about ways to establish contact with the Martians, such as inscribing the Pythagorean theorem at half the size of Europe across the Sahara desert, were rampant.
Critics of Lowell's theories pointed out that not even an instrument as powerful as his eighteen-inch refractor telescope could reveal thin canals of water on Mars. The skeptics were shocked that people believed Lowell at all. E. E. Barnard, a highly respected astronomer, wrote that he had never seen any canals, only a few dark features and elevated plateaus.
Most of the scientific community supported Barnard, but Lowell's great melodrama was already inspiring popular culture such as Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom novels. It would continue to sway general attitudes and beliefs to a point where the United States government would order radio silence at all of its military installations worldwide for twenty-four hours in 1924 so that the chief of the Army Signal Corps' code section could listen for interplanetary transmissions.
