Victorians Wanted to Contact Aliens Using Giant Mirrors

In 1899, while Nicola Tesla was working in his lab in Colorado Springs, he started registering strange electric disturbances on one of his sensors. 

Tesla believed he had intercepted an interplanetary communication, and for the rest of his life, he would work on creating a system that would allow Earth to answer back. He wasn’t alone. As the French scholar Florence Raulin Cerceau has documented, for the previous century or so, a small group of serious, Victorian-era scientists had been working on proposals for extraterrestrial communication.

Mostly, they involved giant mirrors.

Source: Atlas Obscura