In 1881, in a series of essays titled The Poetry of Astronomy, astronomer and popularizer Richard Proctor argued for the value of imagination in the practice of astronomy. He wrote that no one “who studies aright the teachings of the profoundest students of nature will fail to perceive that [they] have been moved in no small degree by poetic instincts, and that their best scientific work has owed as much to their imagination as to their reasoning and perceptive faculties.” Comparing astronomy to poetry was no mere rhetorical flourish for Proctor–it was imagination, in his view, that transformed dry scientific data into knowledge. Imagination gave the astronomer access to causes and meanings that were not physically evident.
Percival Lowell at his observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona in 1914.
Percival Lowell at his observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona in 1914.
Proctor had no small stake in debates over how astronomy should be practiced and who had authority to produce astronomical knowledge claims. As historian Joshua Nall recounts in his book News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860–1910, Proctor made his living publishing astronomical texts for public consumption. When writing for the public, Proctor drew authority from his own bona fides as a practicing astronomer. When addressing his peers in the scientific community, he argued that his ability to reach wide audiences and support himself with his scientific writing made him a true professional.
Mars was at the center of many of Proctor’s debates with other astronomers. At the end of the 19th century, astronomers and the public were fascinated with the red planet, and both knowledge of and speculation about Mars seemed to be growing by leaps and bounds. In 1877, the same year American astronomer Asaph Hall discovered that Mars had two moons, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli published hand-drawn maps reflecting his observations of the planet’s surface. Schiaparelli’s maps indicated that the surface of Mars was criss-crossed by a system of channels that he labeled canali. A public controversy ensued about whether those canali were built by an intelligent civilization.
Proctor’s writings enthusiastically described canals and civilizations on the surface of Mars. He and his fellow canal enthusiast Percival Lowell, founder of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, have been dismissed in hindsight as out of sync with professional astronomy during that period. Proctor and Lowell published in newspapers and in cheaply produced publications, not in the professional journals of the “real” astronomers, and that choice has led historians to mark them as amateurs or outsiders. But in characterizing Proctor and Lowell as discredited popularizers, historians have mostly relied on the words of their critics, the victors in the Mars debates. Nall invites us to reconsider Proctor’s position through a careful examination of his writings. Nall’s analysis suggests that historians should rethink debates about what constituted professional astronomy in the late 19th century and reexamine astronomy’s relationship with the emerging mass media of the day. Newspaper and book publishers were eager to cash in on public desire for news about Mars. Meanwhile, astronomers were interested in the popular press’s ability to spread their ideas and bolster their authority.
Proctor harnessed the press to sell his vision of scientific practice. His approach was multidisciplinary, anti-elitist, and populist in character, but was not “amateur,” as modern readers understand that term. He used what Nall describes as an “imaginative astronomy,” a set of methods that employed analogy to link his readers’ familiar, lived experience with the concepts he described and with the scientific evidence gained through astronomical observation of the planets. In Proctor’s view, his approach to astronomy was entirely professional.
Proctor and Lowell’s opponents, on the other hand, advocated a very different kind of astronomical professionalism. Chief among them were the astronomers of California’s Lick Observatory, whose first director, Edward Holden, attempted to frame their speculation about life on Mars as newspaper sensationalism. Holden and his peers also sought to make a living from their science and to wrest scientific authority from gentlemen astronomers whose reputation stemmed to no small degree from their social station. The new generation of astronomers distinguished themselves from the older generation by their physical instruments; they incorporated spectroscopy and other new methods to make claims about the composition of stars and planets.
The so-called new astronomy upset the field’s existing power structure at exactly the moment when the rise of mass media created a new venue where astronomers could fight for disciplinary authority. Proctor and Lowell represented threats to the new astronomy, not because they were wrong, but because they were popular. Proctor had a talent for writing for the public, and Lowell frequently issued press releases about his latest maps of Martian canals. Holden’s opposition was based in a fear that not only did the canal headlines bring bad science to the public, but they were crowding out the reports about Mars that were coming from his own observatory.
Nall’s nuanced account of how astronomers attempted to discredit and compete with Proctor and Lowell shows that the disciplinary norms of professional astronomy emerged during, not before, the canal controversy. The victors in the debate won by forging alliances between observatories and the press and thus establishing which astronomers and observatories would be considered reliable sources of news from Mars. Nall shows that Proctor and Lowell were not led to wrong conclusions because they were amateurs, but that they were marked as amateurs because they failed to fall in line with the emerging norms of the new astronomy.
Matthew Shindell is curator of planetary science and exploration at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.
