In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli described physical attributes he saw on Mars including light and dark areas referred to as ‘seas’ and ‘continents’ as well as ‘canali’ to indicate what he thought were channels. The ‘canali’ were incorrectly translated into ‘canals’ which sparked a theory that lifeforms existed on Mars. In 1894, US astronomer Percival Lowell was so influenced by Schiaparelli’s work, that he mapped hundreds of canals and wrote three books filled with illustrations of artificial structures he thought he identified on the planet.