Entry tags:
The Earth is Flat
The Greeks knew that the world was round. Eratosthenes calculated it's circumference with a reasonable accuracy given that he did so with little more than sticks, strings and some simple math. Even during the religiously dominated Dark Ages, Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology.
In spite of Washington Irving's biography of Christopher Columbus, the people of Columbus's time knew that the world was round. They just thought it was bigger than Columbus did. And they were right. If America wasn't there, Columbus would have died at sea trying to get to China.
So why would it be that in the later half of the 19th Century, with over two millennia of science and practical experience with the sphericity of the Earth, was there a sudden insistence that the earth was flat?
It likely began with an English writer named Samuel Rowbotham who, in the summer of 1838, performed an experiment. He waded into the river and used a telescope held eight inches above the water to watch a boat with a five-foot mast row slowly away from him. He reported that the vessel remained constantly in his view for the full six miles, whereas, had the water surface been curved it should have disappeared below the horizon. Writing under the pseudonym "Parallax", he produced a pamphlet in 1849 called Zetetic Astronomy, with a number of additional "proofs" for the Earth being flat, such as "It has been shown that the moon is not a reflector of the sun's light, but is self-luminous."
And nobody cared. He was generally considered just another crackpot until 1859 when Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species."
Before the birth of what we understand to be modern science, those who studied the universe were known as Natural Philosophers. Many were highly religious men who looked at the wonder's of God's creation and felt called to understand it in minute detail. To describe God's works was to them a holy thing. And for centuries, that worked well enough as they found few things that contradicted their faith directly or couldn't be re-imaged as metaphor.
But then Charles Darwin's theory of evolution changed all that. If man was descended from ape-like ancestors then Adam and Eve never existed. Without them, there was no original sin of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Without original sin there was no need for the sacrifice of Jesus to save mankind from damnation. Faith could survive an Earth that was millions or billions of years old rather than merely six thousand, faith could survive continental drift, faith could survive without aether or phlogiston, faith could survive the existence of dinosaurs, but the elimination of sin and blood sacrifice undercut the very purpose of Christianity.
Natural philosophy died and biblical literalism was born, including the otherwise indefensible proposition that the Earth was flat.
"After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth holding back the four winds of the earth,
that no wind might blow on the earth or sea or against any tree."
It wasn't a sudden or complete change, to be sure, but vocal and convincing orators were able to take what was previously a fringe idea and, with the mantle of faith, push it further into the mainstream. In 1864 Rowbotham agreed to an actual test. Astronomy writer Richard Proctor and others had calculated that the light of Eddystone lighthouse off the coast of Devon should have just been visible, the rest of the lighthouse concealed by the curvature of the sea. In looking through the provided telescope it turned out that only half the light was visible, which, given Rowbotham's assertions that it was perspective and not curvature that created the "illusion" of curvature, should have been even more convincing. He was not moved. In fact, his counter arguments, though wrong, were so convincing that many left agreeing that "some of the most important conclusions of modern astronomy had been seriously invalidated"
In 1870, a Parallax supporter by the name of John Hampden offered a wager that he could show, by repeating Rowbotham's experiment, that the earth was flat. The noted naturalist and qualified surveyor Alfred Russel Wallace accepted the wager in what became known as the Bedford Level Experiment. Even though the judges ruled in favor of a spherical earth, Hampden simply refused to admit that he could not see the boat and sued Wallace.
Wallace won the bet never saw a shilling.
The Flat Earth Society, heir to Parallax's Universal Zetetic Society, survives to this day, though thankfuly much diminished in power and influence. Certainly the advent of the space age and the ability of humans and cameras to be put into space to actually see the curvature of the Earth directly has turned most away from the idea that the Earth is flat. Zetitics counter that globularism is a false religion, scientists are witch doctors engaged in a vast conspiracy and spaceflight is a hoax.
Keep that in mind when you're thinking the 21st Century is a very different world from the 19th.
In spite of Washington Irving's biography of Christopher Columbus, the people of Columbus's time knew that the world was round. They just thought it was bigger than Columbus did. And they were right. If America wasn't there, Columbus would have died at sea trying to get to China.
So why would it be that in the later half of the 19th Century, with over two millennia of science and practical experience with the sphericity of the Earth, was there a sudden insistence that the earth was flat?
It likely began with an English writer named Samuel Rowbotham who, in the summer of 1838, performed an experiment. He waded into the river and used a telescope held eight inches above the water to watch a boat with a five-foot mast row slowly away from him. He reported that the vessel remained constantly in his view for the full six miles, whereas, had the water surface been curved it should have disappeared below the horizon. Writing under the pseudonym "Parallax", he produced a pamphlet in 1849 called Zetetic Astronomy, with a number of additional "proofs" for the Earth being flat, such as "It has been shown that the moon is not a reflector of the sun's light, but is self-luminous."
And nobody cared. He was generally considered just another crackpot until 1859 when Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species."
Before the birth of what we understand to be modern science, those who studied the universe were known as Natural Philosophers. Many were highly religious men who looked at the wonder's of God's creation and felt called to understand it in minute detail. To describe God's works was to them a holy thing. And for centuries, that worked well enough as they found few things that contradicted their faith directly or couldn't be re-imaged as metaphor.
But then Charles Darwin's theory of evolution changed all that. If man was descended from ape-like ancestors then Adam and Eve never existed. Without them, there was no original sin of eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Without original sin there was no need for the sacrifice of Jesus to save mankind from damnation. Faith could survive an Earth that was millions or billions of years old rather than merely six thousand, faith could survive continental drift, faith could survive without aether or phlogiston, faith could survive the existence of dinosaurs, but the elimination of sin and blood sacrifice undercut the very purpose of Christianity.
Natural philosophy died and biblical literalism was born, including the otherwise indefensible proposition that the Earth was flat.
"After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth holding back the four winds of the earth,
that no wind might blow on the earth or sea or against any tree."
It wasn't a sudden or complete change, to be sure, but vocal and convincing orators were able to take what was previously a fringe idea and, with the mantle of faith, push it further into the mainstream. In 1864 Rowbotham agreed to an actual test. Astronomy writer Richard Proctor and others had calculated that the light of Eddystone lighthouse off the coast of Devon should have just been visible, the rest of the lighthouse concealed by the curvature of the sea. In looking through the provided telescope it turned out that only half the light was visible, which, given Rowbotham's assertions that it was perspective and not curvature that created the "illusion" of curvature, should have been even more convincing. He was not moved. In fact, his counter arguments, though wrong, were so convincing that many left agreeing that "some of the most important conclusions of modern astronomy had been seriously invalidated"
In 1870, a Parallax supporter by the name of John Hampden offered a wager that he could show, by repeating Rowbotham's experiment, that the earth was flat. The noted naturalist and qualified surveyor Alfred Russel Wallace accepted the wager in what became known as the Bedford Level Experiment. Even though the judges ruled in favor of a spherical earth, Hampden simply refused to admit that he could not see the boat and sued Wallace.
Wallace won the bet never saw a shilling.
The Flat Earth Society, heir to Parallax's Universal Zetetic Society, survives to this day, though thankfuly much diminished in power and influence. Certainly the advent of the space age and the ability of humans and cameras to be put into space to actually see the curvature of the Earth directly has turned most away from the idea that the Earth is flat. Zetitics counter that globularism is a false religion, scientists are witch doctors engaged in a vast conspiracy and spaceflight is a hoax.
Keep that in mind when you're thinking the 21st Century is a very different world from the 19th.