Wisps, Tores, and Good and Bad Reviews

Mars was the big story in astronomy in 1907. In rounding up the significant events of the year, an anonymous writer in the Wall Street Journal asked, “What has been in your opinion the most extraordinary event of the twelve months? Not the financial panic which is occupying our minds to the exclusion of most other thoughts” but “the proof afforded by astronomical observations … that conscious, intelligent human life exists upon the planet Mars.” The writer continued:Hardly noticed was another contest that overlapped with the controversies over the photography of canals, which in the end would pit Lowell and Barnard against one another. As part of his developing scheme of “planetology”—an attempt to give Laplacian/Spencerian cosmology a more quantitative shape—Lowell began to pay at least some attention to the giant planets, which he supposed were worlds in the molten stage of planetary evolution and still glowing by their own internal heat. In March 1907, he was contacted by a British amateur astronomer, Scriven Bolton, of Hyde Park, Leeds, who had recorded a series of “wisps or lacings across the bright equatorial belt” of Jupiter, and asked Lowell to try to confirm them. Lowell gladly took up Bolton’s request, and within a month had done as he could always be counted upon to do and had confirmed Bolton’s class of spidery markings. They were as delicate, in their way, as the canals of Mars—but at least in this case, they were completely non-controversial, since such markings had been seen not only by Bolton but by other observers before and since. Of their character, Lowell confidently affirmed, “The wisps are not wisps of cloud, since they are dark, not light, but gaps strung out in the clouds themselves” [1]