News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860-1910

Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century

by Joshua Nall

Mass media in the late nineteenth century was full of news from Mars. In the wake of Giovanni Schiaparelli’s 1877 discovery of enigmatic dark, straight lines on the red planet, astronomers and the public at large vigorously debated the possibility that it might be inhabited. As rivalling scientific practitioners looked to marshal allies and sway public opinion—through newspapers, periodicals, popular books, exhibitions, and encyclopaedias—they exposed disagreements over how the discipline of astronomy should be organized and how it should establish acceptable conventions of discourse.

News from Mars provides a new account of this extraordinary episode in the history of astronomy, revealing how major transformations in astronomical practice across Britain and America were inextricably tied up with popular scientific culture and a transatlantic news economy that enabled knowledge to travel. As Joshua Nall argues, astronomers were journalists, too, eliding practice with communication in consequential ways. As writers and editors, they played a pivotal role in the emergence of a “new astronomy” dedicated to the study of the physical constitution and life history of celestial objects, blurring harsh distinctions between those who produced esoteric knowledge and those who disseminated it. 

Genres: Science, History

312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

Joshua Nall is curator of modern sciences at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. He is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, where he serves as chair of the society’s Heritage Committee.

Reviews

[Shrike58 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Joshua Nall has written himself a rather ambitious monograph, in that he's equally interested in how changes in what it meant to be an astronomer (mostly the rise of astrophysics as a discipline), the efflorescence of period print journalism, and technological advancements (particularly in telecommunications) all came together as a complex, and hangs the whole assemblage on the hook of the debate on whether there was intelligent life on Mars.

This is all heady stuff, and I was given a lot of food for thought, but Nall's writing style does him no favors. On one hand, he splits his hairs so fine that one can feel as though you're left with nothing. On the other, there is a certain clumsiness here that is at odds with the sophistication of the concepts, particularly when you have word choices such as "Teddy-Rooseveltian" for one to trip over. Still worth reading if one is interested in the interaction of science and public opinion.

Actual rating: 3.5.

[Sharad Pandian · Rating 5 out of 5]

...by tracing the working practices of key practitioners across astrophysics and planetary science, with a focus on the media life-worlds they inhabited, I present the public sphere as an essential component of scientific practice itself. (180)

A charming, short (180 pages) and tightly argued case-study of how astronomy and the emerging sensationalist, egalitarian "New Journalism" media were mutually bound in the scientific/public knowledge battles over Mars, its canals, and Martian life.

What's remarkable is that it manages to deal with very sophisticated material - including connections between what we can call an observer's regress (where the right observation needs to be established alongside the credibility of the observer); changes in propagation techniques and technology (telegraphy and the penny press); changes in geography (going Westward across the Atlantic and then through the frontier, to South America, as well as moving to a higher, more rarefied atmosphere); changes in the ideal observer (now the "astronomer-adventurer"); and attempts at changing astronomic epistemology ("imaginative astronomy" and "event astronomy").

And yet, it reads like a simple, straight-forward study, accessible to anyone. This just convinces me that Historians of Science continue to do work as sophisticated as any theory-intoxicated scholar, only with considerably less self-aggrandizement.

[Dulce · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very interesting book, which raised my awareness of how the dissemination of ideas to the public was closely linked to developments in astronomy and the possibility of life on Mars. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in astronomy, history and science, or who has a curiosity about the universe.