Mars perhaps first caught public fancy in the late 1870s, when Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiapparelli reported using a telescope to observe canali, or channels, on Mars. A possible mistranslation of this word as canals may have fired the imagination of Percival Lowell, an American businessman with an interest in astronomy. Lowell founded an observatory in Arizona, where his observations of the red planet convinced him that the canals were dug by intelligent beings - a view which he energetically promoted for many years. By the turn of the century, popular songs told of sending messages between Earth and Mars by way of huge signal mirrors. On the dark side, H.G. Wells' 1898 novel The War of the Worlds portrayed an invasion of Earth by technologically superior Martians desperate for water. In the early 1900s novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs, known for the Tarzan series, also entertained young readers with tales of adventures among the exotic inhabitants of Mars, which he called Bars...