An Arizona observatory was built to study Martian canals.

1877 · 1894 · apart: 17 years

Millionaire Percival Lowell founded it in 1894 to observe the Martian civilisation. There were no canals, but in 1930 the observatory discovered Pluto.

◍ Show on the globe

The event

• The canals of Mars1877 · Brera Observatory, Milan. Giovanni Schiaparelli mapped a network of dark lines on Mars and called them canali, 'channels'. English readers took it as 'canals', something built, and for decades the public believed in Martian engineers. The lines turned out to be an optical illusion.

19th century

More amazing facts

• 1875 Mendeleev corrected the discoverer of an element he had never seen.
• 1876 · 1877 Bell wanted people to answer the telephone with a sailor's 'Ahoy!'. What stuck was 'Hello!', suggested by Thomas Edison in 1877.
• 1876 The telephone and the end of samurai swords arrived together: Bell patented the telephone in March 1876, and on 28 March Japan banned carrying swords in public.
• 1876 On the very day Custer died at the Little Bighorn, Bell was showing off the telephone.
• 1876 The telephone was invented twice on the same day. On 14 February 1876 both Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray filed papers for similar devices at the patent office, and who came first was fought over in court for years.
• 1877 · 1881 Samurai and cowboys were contemporaries: the samurai's last stand at Shiroyama came in September 1877, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral just four years later, in 1881.

All amazing facts (1058) →