Constructing Canals on Mars: Event Astronomy and the Transmission of International Telegraphic News
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This article 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 in their ascendancy in the last two decades of the nineteenth century: astrophysics, and the global telegraphic distribution of news. New transmission technologies—in particular submarine telegraphy and its consequent media genre, the globally-networked newspaper—are shown to have become fundamentally embedded within the working practices of remote astrophysical observatories, entangling professional spaces of observation with public forms of mass media. These novel 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 preeminent English-language publisher of international news, the
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1545-6994