There is no direct and positive evidence that the earth is round
A charlatan [who is] thoroughly alive to the weakness of his opponents
Three-hundred years after the death of Copernicus, Samuel Birley Rowbotham knew what he had to do. Orthodoxies must be abandoned. It was time for a new generation of scientists to rip everything up and start again. The foundation of the world and everything in it had been constructed atop false premises – and no one had been thoughtful or brave enough to correct it.
“It is thus candidly admitted that there is no direct and positive evidence that the earth is round, that it is only ‘imagined’ or assumed to be so in order to afford an explanation of ‘scores of phenomena,’” he wrote. “This is precisely the language of Copernicus, of Newton, and of all astronomers who have laboured to prove the rotundity of the earth. It is pitiful in the extreme that after so many ages of almost unopposed indulgence, philosophers instead of beginning to seek, before everything else, the true constitution of the physical world, are still to be seen labouring only to frame hypotheses, and to reconcile phenomena with imaginary and ever-shifting foundations. Their labour is simply to repeat and perpetuate the self-deception of their predecessors.”
Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe would ultimately have a far more wide-ranging impact than its predecessor, Biology: An Inquiry into the Came of Natural Heath, Showing it not to Arise from Old Age, but from a Gradual Process of Consolidation. The tract’s failure to shake the scientific community’s foundation was not for lack of ambition. Having recently been cast from the Owenite socialist community he’d led, Rowbotham sought to make a new name for himself in the worlds of scientific and medical research.
Biology offered insight into its own breakthrough revelation – that human death was the product of a build up in “earthy matter.” Avoiding foods rich in lime sulfur and phosphate could lead to eternal life – or at very least, a good thousand years.
“Bread, from wheaten flour, when considered in relation to the amount of nutritious matter it contains, may with justice be called the ‘staff of life,’” he explained, “but in regard to the amount of earthy matter, we may with equal justice pronounce it the ‘staff of death!’ ”
Despite insisting that he’d collected evidence of such claims, Rowbotham ultimately abandoned them for new theories. While still charged with running the Manea commune, he’d embarked on research of a different nature entirely. On a winter’s day, he’d placed a powerful telescope on an iced-over canal and viewed skaters some six miles away. It was, he reasoned, fair evidence that the Earth did not possess the curvature highlighted by the globe model. Published in 1865 under the pseudonym Parallax, Zetetic Astronomy offered the definitive portrait of his search for the flat Earth.
The book opens with an explanation of the titular concept. “Zetetic,” Rowbotham explains, is derived from “zeteo”: to seek by means of reason. The word appears frequently in both Greek philosophy and the New Testament – the latter of which is, no doubt, where it was originally encountered by the author. By the book’s end, the veil of scientific inquiry is lifted – in its place, a rather thorough breakdown of how biblical verses comport with his own flat Earth theories.
The author bemoans the rejection of the bible in favor of the works of scientists like Newton, before comparing the mind of the “dogged atheist” to that of an ox,
He may see nothing higher, more noble, more intelligent, or beautiful than himself; and in this his pride, conceit, and vanity, find an incarnation. To such a creature there is no God; for he is himself, in his own estimation, an equal with, and equal to, the highest being he has ever recognised, or the evidence of which he has seen the possibility. Such atheism exists to an alarming extent among the philosophers and deep thinkers of Europe and America; and it has been mainly created and fostered by the astronomical and geological theories of the day.
An 1898 follow up, Inconsistency of Modern Astronomy and its Opposition to the Scripture, Rowbotham was even more plain about the perceived conflicts between modern scientific inquiry and faith. He had since become a fixture on the lecture circuit, offering a lively counter-narrative to the globe Earth.
“Without endorsing ‘Parallax’s’ teachings,” The Leeds Times reported, “it must be said that he advanced them, supported them, and fought for them with a skill and intelligence, tact, and good temper which were not at all equalled by his opponents. One thing he did demonstrate was that scientific dabblers unused to platform advocacy are unable to cope with a man, a charlatan if you will (but clever and thoroughly up in his theory), [who is] thoroughly alive to the weakness of his opponents.”
While Rowbotham proved a hit in front of a crowd, his theories were readily debunked by scientists. A follower, John Hampden, bet that the flat Earth could be proven definitively by Zetetic method. Explorer and trained surveyor, Alfred Russel Wallace, won the £500 using a series of tall poles in the ground that properly demonstrated the surface curvature. Hampden would remain a sore – and rather zealous – loser for the remainder of his life, at one point serving a time in prison for libel and threatening Wallace.
"Madam—If your infernal thief of a husband is brought home some day on a hurdle, with every bone in his head smashed to pulp, you will know the reason,” Hampden wrote in a letter to Wallace’s wife. “Do you tell him from me he is a lying infernal thief, and as sure as his name is Wallace he never dies in his bed.”
Rowbotham died from a cerebral hemorrhage at age 68. The levels of earthy matter in his system at the time of death are uncertain.
Sources:
Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea by Christine Garwood
Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe https://ia802705.us.archive.org/30/items/zeteticastronom00rowbgoog/zeteticastronom00rowbgoog.pdf
Biology. An inquiry into the cause of natural death https://wellcomecollection.org/works/p2szbsat/items
My Life: A Record of Events and Opinion by Alfred Russel Wallace