Marconi Says

"TEN YEARS FROM NOW WE MAY BE TALKING WITH THE INHABITANTS OF THE PLANET MARS."

How the Inventor of Wireless Telegraphy is Planning to Find Out if Mars is Inhabited and What Sort of People They Are

How Mr. Marconi is getting ready to open up communication with the people who live on the planet Mars by wireless telegraphy.

SCIENTIFIC research has encouraged the popular belief that life exists in other worlds than our own. The conditions of climate, atmosphere and warmth on the planet Mars are known to be suited to vegetation and animal life. If we have neighbors on Mars shall we ever know anything about them? Professor Marconi cheerfully declares that we shall; within the next ten years, or sooner, he promises us at least a speaking acquaintance with our planetary cousins.

Nikola Tesla, the great electrical inventor, is even now adjusting the wireless instruments in his tower at Wardenclyffe to signal Mars with million-horsepower electric flashes from Niagara Falls.

And what manner of people will these Martians turn out to be? Many distinguished scientists like Flammarion, Professor Lowell and Sir Robert Ball have attempted to figure out the personal appearance and peculiarities of body and mind of the dwellers on Mars. Fiction writers have given us the imaginative Martian, and Professor Flournoy, of France, has written a curious book on the visits of a trance medium to Mars, with pictures of animals, people and landscapes on that planet, and even the Martian alphabet.

All this, of course, is speculation. But if there are people on Mars the possible importance of all this is beyond the power of the human mind to conceive. From them we may learn the great secrets of the universe, the mysteries of life and death — if the Martians are without sin, the secrets of Heaven and eternity may have been revealed to them.

Editor's note: This article originally contained two sub-articles which were separated for publishing. You can find them here:

"Only a Matter of Patience Now," Says Tesla
"Mars is Surely Inhabited," says Prof. Camille Flammarion

In ten years, probably much less, the world will be able to send messages to Mars directly and unhesitatingly, without a hitch or a stop or a word lost in space. If there existed any accurate knowledge in relation to the possibility of Mars being populated by intelligent beings, and if there existed a commercial necessity for communication with that planet, and if such communication could be coined into profits for a commercial organization, I am certain that the attempt would be made in even less time than I have indicated. That it is possible to transmit signals to Mars I know, as surely as if I had a gun big enough or powder strong enough to shoot there — more surely, in fact, for a gun might miss the mark, while my wireless will strike the entire solar system without aiming.

Attempts to communicate with that planet in the absence of any certain information that there are inhabitants there of sufficient intelligence to recognize our signals as such, and with knowledge sufficient to enable them to translate such signals into their own language, if they possess a language, would be without any certainty of results.

Mars and our earth lie in the same great unbroken bed of ether. We know this because all night long the beams of the sun reflected from Mars’s red surface stream down the astronomer’s telescope.

Wherever light can travel the ether exists, for light is only a vibration or wave of the ether, and the electric disturbances caused by the wireless travels in the same way. If there were a gulf in the ether we would see it, perhaps like a crack in a great block of ice, and Mars and all on the other side of the crack would be invisible.

If our nearest planetary neighbor floating off yonder 48,600,000 miles away is inhabited, it will soon be fairly pelted with messages transmitted with as much certainty and accuracy as were the messages which I recently transmitted from the company’s station at Poldhu, in Cornwall, to H. M. S. Renown, while en voyage to India, bearing the Prince and Princess of Wales. These messages were received on board the Renown until she was within one hundred miles of the Port Said entrance to the Suez Canal.

In order to reach the Renown at that place it was necessary that the messages cross the English Channel, over the Islands of Guernsey and Jersey, over the entire width of France, crossing the Cote-d’Or Mountains, the cities of Orleans and Auxerre, the Alps, Mt. Blanc, town of Lausanne, Switzerland, Lake Geneva, the Italian cities of Milan, Parma, Modena, Bologna and San Martino, crossing almost the entire length of the Apennine Range, the Adriatic Sea, Turkey, the Rindus Mountains, Greece, City of Athens, Mt. St. Elias, crossing the Grecian Archipelago, the Ageah Sea, Karpathos Island and a portion of the Mediterranean.

This feat of transmitting wireless telegrams over a combined route of land and water for a distance of 2,100 miles is even more difficult than sending messages through inter-stellar space where no obstacles intervene.

It is not within my province to say that Mars, Jupiter or any other planets are inhabited; but if they are, and their inhabitants have our senses, they may recognize the new and unnatural disturbances that will be caused about them.

During the past few months wireless telegraphy has progressed with such tremendous and gratifying strides that one might venture almost anything for it and yet be within the bounds of possibility and even probability.

This progress is best illustrated by my recent invention, by means of which I am enabled to direct my wireless messages to a given point with as unerring accuracy as we are now enabled to focus rays of light by means of the lens upon a given point. Recently from the Poldhu station, before referred to, in a test conducted by the British Admiralty, I sent messages to one of the squadron lying at anchor in the harbor of Gibraltar. The commanders of the other ships composing the squadron were instructed by the Admiralty to intercept this message if possible; to confuse it if possible, and to divert it if possible. Nevertheless, under the rigorous conditions prescribed by the Admiralty I was able to communicate with the vessel selected. Messages were uninterrupted, unintercepted, unconfused. None of the other vessels was able to receive those messages.

Subsequently I was able to follow the course of the vessel in question in its voyage through the Strait of Gibraltar, up the coast of France, back to its home station in British waters, all the while preserving the secrecy of the messages inviolate from the attempts of other wireless installations to confuse and to intercept them. This was as severe a test as ever wireless telegraphy has been compelled to undergo. Those messages were transmitted across the English Channel, across the entire length of the Spanish peninsula, over the Cantabrian Mountain, over the Sierra Guadarrama, the Sierra Toledo, Sierra Morena, Sierra Nevada and also over the important cities of Valladolid and Seville.

Martian Knowledge Will Overwhelm Us.

If we are able to send signals through space over such intervening obstacles as mountains, forests, cities, liberating vast quantities of electricity, and yet safely deliver them at the point of reception undisturbed and unconfused, it follows as a natural deduction that it is merely a question of commanding sufficient power to set up the necessary disturbance in the ether where there are no obstructions intervening to send signals to even so distant a point as Mars.

If Mars answers and tells us his history, then, for the first time on earth, imagination and discovery will be of little use to humanity in the face of the flood of actual information which will roll in as fast as our intelligence can comprehend it.

Had any one in his sober senses predicted a generation ago that Europe and America would to-day be communicating with each other without any material agency between the sending and receiving points he would have been adjudged insane or would have been ignored as a crank.

Yet to-day wireless telegraphy has progressed to such an extent that it is actually accomplishing that very thing. Within a very short time it will be accepted as an ordinary fact — a matter of daily commercial routine. Instruments which I have perfected, sending messages at the rate of 200 words per minute, will enable us to send as many words in twenty-four hours through the medium of these two stations—one near Sidney, N. S., and the other on the west coast of Ireland — as are now transmitted by all the cables connecting Europe and America.

Why, then, should it appear preposterous to venture that within a decade, or even half the time, wireless instruments will be so developed and perfected that it will be possible to transmit a message through 50,000,000 miles of space? It is not only possible, but very probable.

It is likely, so far as the system has been evolved, that the first agency capable of rationally reaching as far as Mars, for example, will be the heliograph. And this is only natural.

Why? Because it is an accepted scientific fact that light carries a much greater distance than sound or its equivalent. But, while the heliograph will be the pathfinder through the immensities of space, there is every reason to believe that it will simply be the utilization of wireless telegraphy as it is now being developed.

It may surprise many people that Mars may not be inhabited by unintelligent creatures who could understand in every major instance, our earth before they could travel here if not in a condition to be introduced to the people of other planets.

As a look for an answer to Professor Lowell, an astronomer of note and in good standing in his profession. Quite recently he succeeded in photographing the many Martian canals.

From these photographs it is certain they are not natural builders but instead intelligent beings. Their stupendous canal construction proves that the diggers are neither very small nor likewise and strength, but infinitely skilled and trained in the use of mechanical devices of a nature that could most easily and quickly convert allowing them to visit our planet.

Should the United States ever engage in war with another nation, New York could be made absolutely impregnable for the first time. How? By means of torpedoes operated and discharged by wireless telegraphy.

A Whitehead torpedo, properly equipped, can be launched, timed, and then, while under both water and ship, can be accurately discharged by wireless. It also has been proved conclusively in the course of a series of tests by the British Admiralty that cannon can be fired and all manner of signals given at long distance by the same method.

We have more real substantial information about Mars, our nearest neighbor, than of any other of the planets. Taken altogether, we know that Mars is very much like our earth.

When the southern pole is directed toward the sun it is Summer for the southern hemisphere of Mars and Winter for the northern. The northern pole can be seen growing bigger and whiter, while the southern shrinks and darkens.

It is in connection with the melting ice caps that the famous Martian canals appear. As Mars has little rain and much sun, the globe would be a desert of ice at the poles, and dry land between, without some stupendous system of irrigation. And this is just what appears.

A network of fine lines running from the ice caps to the equator appears clearer and clearer as the warm season advances on each hemisphere and grows fainter during the cold. A ruddy brown area shows dark and spreading about the canals until toward the Fall of the season it changes the entire color of the hemisphere. This, most astronomers agree, can be nothing else than vegetation following the flow of water from the melting ice caps.

The canals are too straight and methodically arranged for nature or accident, according to the latest astronomical belief. An object to be visible in Mars must be at least twenty miles in diameter. As these canals were observed long ago with inferior instruments they must be much more than twenty miles across.

Even the heaviest and fattest human specimen would be an acrobat on Mars. He would vault lightly into second story windows and would find no difficulty in climbing the waterspout or the lightning rod. But the chances are he would feel very insignificant in the presence of the native Martians.

Mars, being smaller and lighter, one would think of pigmy inhabitants to correspond. According to Sir Percival Lowell, Sir William Ramsay, M. Flammarion and other great authorities the Martians are giants. Their reasons are based on force of gravity, which is about a third on Mars of what it is on earth.

Supposing the Martian to be three times as large as a man. If he were on earth he would weigh 27 times as much as a man, and would be unable to support his weight, as the cross section of his muscle would only be nine times as great. But on Mars he would weigh only nine times as much as a man, and with his nine times greater muscles he would be able to support his mighty frame with as little fatigue as a man on earth. In performing work he would be twenty-seven times as efficient as a man were it not that Mars’s lightness makes physical work only one third as hard. Therefore, the work of a laborer on Mars is variously estimated at from fifty to eighty-one days’ work of a man.

Professor Gregory thinks all Martian creatures have enormous chests to adapt themselves to the rarefied Martian atmosphere. Gills like those of a fish would be necessary to give such great volumes of air a short cut to the lungs.

Sir Robert Ball has conceived a Martian with a prolonged nose, or proboscis, and long, slender arms reaching to his feet.

These arms would be strong enough on Mars to carry him up the side of a house from window to window, or up the branches of a tree, without touching the feet at all.

Perhaps the strangest of all attempts to picture the beings on the red planet are those by Professor Flournoy, of the University of Geneva, who drew his ideas from Mlle. Elise Muller, of Geneva, a medium, who believed herself transported to Mars during her hypnotic trances, and reported what she saw on Mars and a strange, unknown planet called Ultramars. Professor Flournoy put her utterance into scientific shape. She saw strange, huge insects, with feathers and long necks, flying about in the dim twilight of Ultramars. Her Martian man is very human, save for his great size.

Emanuel Swedenborg, the great Northern mystic, believed he saw a Martian. The creature was much like a man. His face had a black area about the lower part which looked like a beard, yet he was hairless. He had no chin.

But all this is tributary to the vaster problem of interplanetary communication. If wireless, or the heliograph, proves Professor Lowell to be correct in surmising the Martians to be such a formidable race, we may be thankful that our red neighbor is so distant. Whoever succeeds in mastering the problem will alone be able to say with the poet, “I stole the secret from the stars.”