The turn of the 20th century must have been a wonderful time for those interested in the sky and astronomy. In 1910, Halley’s Comet made a particularly spectacular pass of the Earth, coming so close that the planet passed through the tail of the comet. In Arizona, astronomer Percival Lowell was nightly scanning the planet Mars where he had detected evidence of canals* on that planet and had already published a book on them in 1906 called Mars and its Canals. Canals that he supposed were designed to transport water from the wetter polar regions of the planet to the dryer parts. Canals that had to have been designed and built by—something.
It was under these conditions that author Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, would write his first story chronicling Virginian John Carter and his adventures on the planet Mars in the book A Princess of Mars (1917).
