INTRODUCTION

This globe shows Mars as visualized in the early twentieth century. It was made by Emmy Ingeborg Brun, a Danish amateur astronomer. She was interested in the theories of Percival Lowell, who was in turn inspired by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who published a study of Mars in 1878, including a map showing dark lines he called canali, which can mean both natural channels and artificial canals. Lowell treated them as artificial, the work of Martians struggling to irrigate a drying planet.

Brun studied Lowell's books, adapting his (flat) maps into globes. Twelve examples survive, from 1903-1912. Her placenames are Schiaparelli's mellifluous pseudo-Classical names, many still used today--Chryse, Tharsis, Margaritifer, Argyre, Tithonius. Note that the south pole is at the top, because most maps of the day showed Mars inverted, as it looked through a telescope.

The mottoes on the globe bases, plus a book Brun wrote on the spiritual implications of evolution, make it clear that she hoped Mars might be a spiritually advanced socialist utopia. Within a few more years, though, it became clear Mars's atmosphere was just too cold and thin for life, unless down in deep cracks where air and water would linger; C.S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet (1938) is mostly set in such canyons--decades before the first photographic evidence of the water-carved Mariner Canyon complex. Prescient!

I stumbled on this globe in Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects, a book on things like flashcubes and Kodachrome. The accompanying text by Lucy Garrett focuses on how the 'canal' model of Mars reflected observer's biases more than scientific fact, but ignores the globe as a map--its inversion, its place names, any real features it shows; indeed she implies all its features are false. Not quite! Like CS Lewis, Brun's Mars has prescient details: note how she, like Schiaparelli before her, drew the Mariner Canyon area (spiky blue tongue in the lower right) as a canal-oasis, marked Coprates.

So while this globe is largely a monument to Schiaparelli & Lowell's over-interpretation of blurry glimpses that gave us the canals of Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars and Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, it's not utterly wrong. And is indisputably beautiful.

--Chris Wayan

SOURCE: Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects, 2021: the Globe of Mars chapter by Lucy Garrett, p.137.

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