Who is Giovanni Schiaparelli?

Giovanni Schiaparelli was an Italian astronomer and science historian. He was born in 1835 in the Italian city of Savigliano and died in 1910 in Milan, Italy.

Schiaparelli, who authored the book "Astronomy in the Old Testament," was educated at the University of Turin. In 1861 he discovered 69 Hesperia, which is a large M-type main-belt asteroid. In 1877, he discovered a dense network of linear depressions on the planetary surface of Mars that he called "canali" in Italian, meaning "channels". "Canali" was mistranslated as "canals", which implied the existence of civilization on Mars. Based on this erroneous interpretation of "canali" as "canals", scientists like Percival Lowell began to champion the existence of intelligent life on Mars.