Popular Discourse on Interplanetary Travel

Former NASA historian Steven Dick recounts the claims, first, by American physicist Nikola Tesla and a few decades later by Ital­ian innovator of wireless telegraphy Guglielmo Marconi that they had received wireless signals from Mars. Collier’s Weekly in 1901 reported that Tesla was convinced he was “the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another” and that the supposed radio signals were most likely from Mars.40 By the early 1920s, Marconi apparently repeatedly attempted to receive short-wave radio mes­sages from Mars. Dick writes: “Marconi’s interest in interplanetary communication peaked during a trip from Southampton, England, to New York City aboard [his yacht] the Electra from May 23 to June 16, 1922. The New York Times noted that Marconi ‘spent the time crossing the Atlantic performing many electrical experiments, principally by listening for signals from Mars.’”41 William Sheehan and Steven O’Meara report that two years later, when Mars was at its closest since 1804, “radio stations around the world were urged to simultaneously cease transmissions at specified intervals, so as not to interfere with any attempts by Mars to radio the Earth.”42 Even the U. S. Navy, notes Dick, monitored radio transmissions for potential Martian messages.

News reportage of such events may be the reason so many as­sumed a Martian invasion in October 1938 when a radio broad­cast, seemingly interrupting The Mercury Theatre on the Air pro­gramming, indicated Martians had landed at the Wilmarth farm in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Orson Welles’s radio presentation, discussed in chapter 1, is one of the most singular events in radio history. As Bruce Lenthall points out, broadcast radio was a major news source in the early twentieth century. For audiences in the United States, Lenthall claims: “Radio ownership more than dou­bled in the 1930’s, from about 40% of families at the decade’s start to nearly 90% ten years later. By 1940 more families had radios than had cars, telephones, electricity, or plumbing.”43 Len – thall estimates that 6 million people actually heard the radio play that Howard Koch adapted from H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) and of that number, approximately 1 million listen­ers literally thought Martians had landed. Subsequent to Tesla and Marconi’s independent claims of having detected radio messages from Mars, some contemplated whether Mars was inhabited by a sophisticated civilization whose radio signals the authorities had been listening for. T. S. Eliot noted in the poem “The Dry Salvages” (1941) that popular commentary on means to “communicate with Mars” was one of the “usual [p]astimes.”44

Perhaps interplanetary travel from Mars didn’t seem entirely fantastic given that the twentieth century emerged as an unprec­edented era of global travel. In the first few decades of the cen­tury, train and ocean liner travel expanded exponentially, while motoring, and flight, first achieved in 1903, quickly developed as everyday experiences. Large numbers of people became mobile in ways that just a few years prior had been extremely arduous, or even unimaginable. With the serious development of rocketry in the 1920s and the genesis of the American Interplanetary Society in 1930, followed by the British Interplanetary Society in 1933, travel between Mars and Earth may have finally seemed possible and well within the realm of the imagination.

With large numbers for the first time traversing multiple time zones in a day, British author Virginia Woolf suggested that people began to internalize in finer detail Earth’s global topography. She claimed that her own travel experiences afforded her a better sense of Earth’s surface so that she could easily imagine and rehearse its large topographical contours. When she and her husband Leonard bought a used automobile from sales of her novel To the Light­house (1927), Woolf observed that motoring had been “a great opening up in our lives” that allowed her to “expand that curious thing, the map of the world in ones [sic] mind.”45 As early as 1909, while traveling through Italy, Woolf recorded in her diary: “It is strange how one begins to hold a globe in ones [sic] head; I can travel from Florence to Fitzroy Square [in London] on solid land all the time.”46 She meant that she could easily envision the con­tours of Earth’s globe, as if she could turn the Earth around in her fingers and trace its continents, mountains, islands, and shorelines.

Coincident with the increase in global travel in the first few decades of the twentieth century was the construction of a new generation of large telescopes like the 100-inch at Mount Wilson Observatory. News reports covering astronomical discoveries fre­quently appeared in newspapers and weeklies, so much so that references to lunar and planetary landscapes were taken up in advertising and in the common parlance. In January 1926, while motoring through Persia, Woolf’s close friend and celebrated au­thor Vita Sackville-West wrote to Virginia describing the hills near Thebes in Egypt as a “mountains-of-the-moon landscape.” A year later, in March 1927, Sackville-West was again touring in Persia and wrote to Woolf from Tehran, “[T]here is one little asteroid, called Ceres I think, only four miles across, the same size as the principality of Monaco, on which I have often thought I should like to live, revolving in lonely state round the Sun.”47 Presum­ably Sackville-West had read a news report regarding our larg­est asteroid, currently estimated at 975 kilometers or 606 miles in diameter. Prompted perhaps by Vita’s evocation of other plan­etary landscapes, Woolf in September that year noted in her diary: “What I like. . . about motoring is the sense it gives one of light­ing accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse.”48 Decades later, Spirit and Opportunity offered our first extensive, close-up glimpse of Martian geological processes that have gone unrecorded for eons, and what we have found allows us to more fully internalize the red planet’s landscapes and its geomorphology.