Hello Residents of Mars! Are You Listening to FM104?

 

With the increased interest in the planet Mars, with several space missions reaching the Red Planet in 2021 from China, the United States and the UAE, the attention of this planet in our fellow solar system occupant, is not knew. Was there ever a possibility that life on Mars was tuned into earth radio, even Irish radio? Are they listening to FM104 today? The search for the unknown has led to science fiction, rumours, panic and a media frenzy that dates back almost a century. The science fiction of HG Wells in his Martian attack of Earth in the 1898 book War of the Worlds, would influence the human view of the far off planet.

 

Over a decade before Orson Wells caused real world panic with his War of the Worlds radio broadcast in 1938 and with radio broadcasting in its infancy, radio signals from Mars picked up on a radio set was a major story. Two years before Ireland got its own radio station, 2RN in 1926, the newspapers were full of stories of signals going to and coming from the dwellers on Mars. The excitement enveloped the amateur and the serious scientist alike.

As more and more people began to listen-in, distortions and natural interference with the airwaves, such as sunspots not understood at the time, were identified as signals from outer space. Inventor and one of the father’s of radio broadcasting Nikola Tesla[1] picked up strange signals on his receiving set and immediately speculated that they were coming from Mars. Even the great Marconi himself claimed to have received signals from outer space. Much of the excitement culminated with events in August 1924. A renown astronomer and physicist Professor David Todd was at the forefront of ‘radio from Mars’. As early as October 1919, newspaper headlines like ‘Dr. Todd Revives Astronomers' Old Hope of Talking to Mars’ was earning him vast publicity both in the United States and worldwide as the new medium of radio was evolving. Todd was an academic at Amherst University.

In an article written by Todd in the magazine ‘Wireless Age’ he posed the following questions,

‘Did the Martians try to radio to us on earth? Could the mysterious signals reported when Mars was closer to the earth than it has been for 120 years have been from Mars? Is there any physical condition on Mars that would prevent the Martians from having radio? If the Martians have mastered radio is there any basic reason why they should have fallen into the use of dots and dashes?’

By 1924 Radio and Mars reached a new peak. A radio signal they believed would take 4minutes 21 seconds to reach mars from Earth and a similar amount of time for earth to receive any reply from the creatures and spacemen on the Red Planet. In the book Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television by Jeffrey Sconce he writes,

‘In a story from 1923, ‘The Great Radio Message from Mars’, an operator formerly interested in wireless contact with the dead turns his attention to the red planet. Using a special crystal taken from a meteorite, the experimenter makes a weak connection with the ‘Martians’, who tell him in a garbled message that the ‘negative animal magnetism’ of his family is interfering with their transmissions. The experimenters hasty solution is to kill his entire family with an axe. That same year, Hollywood’s first attempt at a 3D feature ‘Radio Mania’ also released as M.A.R.S, Mars Calling and the Man from Mars, told the story of a starry eyed inventor who believes he has made two way radio contact with Mars only to discover in the end that it was all a dream’

 

On Thursday August 21st 1924 with Mars at its closest point to the earth for nearly ten years, most US radio stations, that cluttered the airwaves, agreed with Professor Todd’s request to go silent for nine minutes from the 50th minutes of every hour from midnight on the 21st for thirty six hours to make receiving a Martian signal easier to hear.  Todd’s assistant in the experiment was Charles Jenkins who was instrumental in the US in the invention and expansion of television.

 

The mission to hear Mars spread beyond the US border. The British Western Mail newspaper reported on August 24th under the headline ‘Has Mars a Wavelength?’ it reported,

‘Preliminary experiments made at 1.30 on Thursday morning[2] at Dulwich village in connection with the reception of possible signals from Mars. Two wireless sets were used, the 24 valve PW set and a six valve set.’

 A 65 foot aerial was used with members of the listening party taking it in turns to keep watch on the 30,000 metre wavelength from 1.30am to 2.30am.

 

According to Henry Woodhouse, the President of the Aerial League of America,

‘This Mars Radio Check-up may give the world more knowledge about the "ruddy" planet than has been obtained by astronomic study since Aristotle made his first observation of Mars 356 years before our era, or 2280 years ago. All that Professor Todd needs from radio fans is a record of the radio strength at the time they listened to whatever happened to be on the air, with the approximate time when it was strong or faint. Reports covering a day or longer will be most helpful, but those covering an hour in a day will have value. These reports should be addressed to Professor David Todd, Chairman of the Mars Check-up, Aerial League of America, 280 Madison Avenue, New York City’.

 

One newspaper reported that attempts in wireless communications with Mars would take place from Jungfranjock, Switzerland with extremely powerful wireless sets ‘in the hope of picking up any messages that the Martians may be sending us’ Professor Low from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich speculated that the Martians are more likely to receive messages sent by smoke or light than wireless. Professor Eddington, an astronomer at Cambridge University called the experiment to contact Mars as ‘absolute nonsense’.

 

After a weekend across the world attempting to make contact with Mars, the experiments were deemed a failure but almost a century later Mars is still the focus of attention from the humans on earth.

 

Sources

Amherst University Archive

Scientific American

Wireless Age Magazine

New York Times Archives

American Radio History

British Newspaper Archives

Irish Newspaper Archives

Transmitting the Past: Historical and Cultural Perspectives on Broadcasting

edited by J. Emmett Winn, Susan Lorene Brinson

The Dissertation of Emily M. Simpson for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History of Science presented on June 12, 2018. Title: Mars and Popular Astronomy, 1890-1910

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[1] According to NASA, ‘Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), a brilliant Serbian-American inventor and scientist, is building a wireless system to communicate with Martians. (N. Tesla, "Talking with the planets", Collier's Weekly, Vol 24, 4-5, 1901)’.

[2] No British station would be on air after midnight