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Article ID: CBB062853415

Constructing Canals on Mars: Event Astronomy and the Transmission of International Telegraphic News (2017)

Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 108
Issue: 2
Pages: 280-306

URI: http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/692678

DOI: 10.1086/692678

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Astrophysics Telecommunications Mars Canals Telegraphy 19th century Pickering, William Henry

This essay presents a new explanation for the emergence after 1877 of public and expert fascination with a single observed feature of the planet Mars: its network of “canals.” Both the nature of these canals and their widespread notoriety emerged, it is argued, from a novel partnership between two practices then in their ascendancy: astrophysics and the global telegraphic distribution of news. New technologies of global media are shown to have become fundamentally embedded within the working practices of remote astrophysical sites, entangling professional spaces of observation with popular forms of journalism. These collaborations gave rise to a new type of “event astronomy,” as exemplified by the close working relationship forged between the enterprising Harvard astronomer William Henry Pickering and the New York Herald. Pickering’s telegrams to the Herald, sent from his remote mountain outstation in Arequipa, Peru, are shown to be at the heart of the “great Mars boom” of August 1892, with significant consequences for emerging and contested accounts of the red planet. By tracing the particular transmission effects typical to this new kind of astronomical work, the essay shows how the material, temporal, and linguistic constraints imposed by telegraphic news distribution shaped and bounded what could be said about, and therefore what could be known about, Mars.

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