Today, 17 December, marks 125 years since the formal announcement of one of the most eccentric, ambitious, and ultimately consequential prizes in the history of science: the Prix Pierre Guzman. Announced by the French Académie des Sciences in December 1900, the award promised 100,000 francs, which is the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars today, to the first person who could successfully communicate with a celestial body and receive a response. But there was a catch: communication with the planet Mars was explicitly forbidden!
Why was Mars“too easy”?
The Prix Guzman was the creation of Anne Émilie Clara Goguet Guzman, a wealthy widow who wished to honor the memory of her late son, Pierre Guzman. Pierre was a passionate amateur astronomer, influenced by the wildly popular writings of Camille Flammarion, whose 1892 work La planète Mars et ses conditions d’habitabilité (The Planet Mars and Its Conditions of Habitability) convinced a generation that the Red Planet was riddled with “canals,” which suggested there may be intelligent life on Mars. In this cultural context, which was the height of the Martian craze that would soon inspire H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, many people, including Clara Guzman, felt that contacting Martians was not a matter of if, but when.
Therefore, the main 100,000-franc prize was reserved for a much harder challenge: establishing contact with any other celestial body. You name it: a fixed star, a distant planet, or a moon. What mattered was receiving an unequivocal reply. The initial deadline was set for a decade. To no one’s surprise, no one won the grand prize during the initial decade, nor the one after that. The prize, by its nature, was scientifically unachievable given the technology of the time. However, Clara Guzman’s will contained a shrewd contingency clause that completely redefined the prize’s legacy.
The prize that failed forward
While the monumental 100,000-franc principal awaited an improbable alien transmission, the Prize Guzman contained a pragmatic contingency. The accrued interest from the endowment was mandated to be awarded every five years for the most significant progress in astronomy. A parallel annual prize from the interest was also established for achievements in cardiac medicine. This shrewd clause that was intended as a temporary measure until extraterrestrial contact occurred, effected quite the transformation. It redirected an unfulfillable fantasy into a steady, reliable source of funding for fundamental research, arriving precisely when French astronomy needed institutional stability.
For over 70 years, the resulting five-yearly award, formally known as the Prix d’Astronomie de la Fondation Pierre Guzman, became a prestigious honor. It rewarded astronomers whose work ranged from precise terrestrial measurements (like the speed of light) to monumental projects like mapping the Moon by Maurice Loewy.
Henri Perrotin and the speed of light (1905)
The first interest prize awarded under the Guzman Foundation, in December 1905, posthumously recognized the lifetime achievements of Henri Joseph Anastase Perrotin (1845–1904). Perrotin, the first Director of the prestigious Nice Observatory (founded in 1880), embodied the type of meticulous, dedicated scientist the prize sought to support. His body of work spanned classical celestial mechanics and precise terrestrial physics. Perrotin was a successful observer of minor planets as he discovered six asteroids between 1874 and 1885, including the early-found (138) Tolosa and (252) Clementina; he developed his doctoral thesis on the theory of the orbit of the asteroid Vesta, contributing to the complex calculations needed to track objects in the solar system; and perhaps most impressively, in 1902, Perrotin and his colleague Prim conducted the most accurate measurement of the speed of light for over three decades, using a mechanical revolving mirror over a 92-kilometer path. The precision he achieved was considered a major scientific breakthrough on Earth, not in space.
Though Perrotin had passed away in February 1904, the Academy posthumously granted him the interest prize in 1905, recognizing that his combination of practical observatory management, discoveries in the solar system, and high-precision physical measurement constituted the era’s most significant progress in astronomy. A portion of that first prize was also awarded to Louis Fabry (1862–1939), another mathematician-astronomer. Fabry specialized in calculating the orbits of comets and minor planets. He developed rapid numerical methods for computing ephemerides (tables giving the coordinates of celestial bodies).
The long shadow of an impossible dream
That huge 100,000-franc grand prize for alien contact? It just sat there, gathering dust and interest, a beautiful, impossible fantasy. But here’s the unexpected twist that makes the story so human: the humble interest it generated ended up being the real hero. The legacy of the Prix Pierre Guzman isn’t the failure to get a cosmic call-back from E.T. It’s the continuous success of the small, mandated awards that followed. That steady stream of funding built the muscle and backbone of French astronomy right here on Earth. It proves that sometimes, the most impractical, almost silly ambitions can accidentally create the most solid, practical results. The fallback plan became far more consequential than the unreachable main goal that was intended to fund a fantasy. So no matter what your thoughts are on how your 2025 year went, remember that when a huge dream fails, the small, consistent efforts almost always find a way to win!
