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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