Weird Earth. Donald R. Prothero
do not rise and set the same for all men everywhere but rise and set sooner for those in the east than for those in the west; and of this there is no other cause than the bulge of the earth. Moreover, celestial phenomena evidence that they rise sooner for Orientals than for westerners. For one and the same eclipse of the moon which appears to us in the first hour of the night appears to Orientals about the third hour of the night, which proves that they had night and sunset before we did, of which setting the bulge of the earth is the cause.17
Figure 2.1. Diagram showing Eratosthenes’s famous experiment to calculate the size and curvature of the earth. He noticed that at summer solstice, the sun was directly overhead in Syene (which is on the Tropic of Cancer, where the sun’s rays come straight down on the first day of summer). Meanwhile, to the north where he lived in Alexandria, the sun made a 7° angle from a post sticking vertically above the ground. Eratosthenes used this angle and the known distance between Syene and Alexandria to calculate the size of the earth to within 1 percent of the values we know now. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)
The myth that most educated people in the medieval times and up to 1492 believed in a flat earth is a relatively recent notion. As Jeffrey Burton Russell documented in his 1991 book, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians, American author Washington Irving, famous for his stories of Rip van Winkle and the Headless Horseman of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” created this fiction; he needed to spice up the conflict between the Church and Columbus in order to improve the drama for his 1828 book, A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. Irving was very widely read and cited, so his myth entered all the American history textbooks for the next century. Even as late as 1983, it was still widely believed, and the myth appeared in historian Daniel Boorstin’s best-selling book, The Discoverers.
Modern Flat-Earthism
In fact, flat-earth beliefs were a rare fringe idea with few followers until relatively recently. In the 1800s, the most famous flat-earther was Samuel Rowbotham (1816–1884). In the 1860s, he pioneered the modern flat-earther notion that the earth was a disk centered over the North Pole (fig. 2.2), bounded on its outer edge by a wall of ice (instead of Antarctica over the South Pole, which cannot exist in their version of geography). The skies above were a dome of fixed stars only five thousand kilometers above the earth’s surface, consistent with the old medieval notion of the heavens before the birth of modern astronomy. His ideas were first published in a pamphlet called Zetetic Astronomy, followed by a book called Earth Is Not a Globe, and another pamphlet, The Inconsistency of Modern Astronomy and Its Opposition to the Scriptures, which revealed the biblical literalist roots of most flat-earth thinking.
According to Rowbotham, the “Bible, alongside our senses, supported the idea that the earth was flat and immovable and this essential truth should not be set aside for a system based solely on human conjecture.”18 He is correct in saying this, because there are at least sixteen places where the Bible says the earth is flat; talks about the “four corners of the earth,” the “ends of the earth,” and the “circle of the earth”; or suggests that you can see the entire earth from a high place.19 Rowbotham and later followers like William Carpenter and Lady Elizabeth Blount kept promoting the idea and founded the Universal Zetetic Society after Rowbotham’s death in 1884. This incarnation of flat-earth thinking died out some time after 1904.
After about fifty years of virtually no organized activity, the rebirth of flat-earth thinking occurred in 1956 with the founding of Samuel Shenton’s International Flat Earth Research Society, based in his home in Dover, England. Always a tiny group, with a very limited membership, they corresponded through a homemade mailed newsletter, yet every once in a while, they managed to get a short burst of publicity in the newspapers. In the 1960s and 1970s, when Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts first began to produce images of the earth from space, Shenton dismissed the images as hoaxes (the common belief among flat-earthers ever since), saying, “It’s easy to see how a photograph like that could fool the untrained eye.”20 Later, he attributed the curvature of the earth seen in NASA photographs to a trick of the curvature of wide-angle lenses: “It’s a deception of the public and it isn’t right.”21
Figure 2.2. Map of the earth from a north polar projection. (Courtesy NASA.)
After Shenton’s death in 1971, Charles K. Johnson picked up the mantle and inherited Shenton’s library from his wife. He reorganized the group as the International Flat Earth Research Society of America and Covenant People’s Church, where they maintained their lonely quest at his home in the town of Lancaster in the Mojave Desert.22 They claimed to have reached a membership as large as 3,500, scattered around the world, paying annual dues of six to ten dollars. The society communicated via the quarterly Flat Earth News, a four-page tabloid written and edited almost entirely by Johnson and sent in the mail. As hard-core biblical literalists, they emphasized all the passages that state that the earth is flat. Every few years, they would get smirking coverage in the newspapers, but their membership declined during the 1990s, especially after a fire at Johnson’s house in 1997 destroyed all records and membership contact information. Johnson’s wife died shortly afterward, and then the society itself vanished when Johnson died on March 19, 2001.
Flat-earth thinking might still be a tiny fringe belief with no organized leadership were it not for the internet and the ability of believers all around the earth to find each other and organize a virtual community. In 2004, the Flat Earth Society was resurrected by Daniel Shenton (no relation to Samuel) as a web-based discussion forum and then eventually relaunched as an official society, with a large web presence and their own wiki.23 As of July 2017, they claimed a membership of five hundred people. However, the publicity from celebrity entertainers and musicians, such as those discussed at the beginning of this chapter, seems to suggest that flat-earth ideas are much more common (see chap. 18), even if the believers are not official members of the Flat Earth Society. There are a number of other flat-earth societies on the internet not affiliated to Shenton’s group. The first Flat Earth International Conference met in Raleigh, North Carolina, on November 9 and 10, 2017, with about five hundred attendees.24 In May 2018, there was a three-day flat-earth convention in Birmingham, England, with several hundred attendees who traveled all the way to England to hear a spectrum of speakers with a common belief in the flat earth.25 Even more alarming, about a third of millennials are not convinced that the earth is round (as discussed in chap. 18).26 And there are calls on the internet for a reality show to let the flat-earthers test their ideas and actually try to travel off the edge of the earth!27
In 2018, Netflix produced a documentary about the flat-earthers called Behind the Curve.28 Like most such documentaries, it consists mostly of interviews of the major advocates of a particular idea (in this case, the flat earth) and contrasting views of other interviewees who regard the believers as crazy. It starts with one of the stars of the flat-earth movement, Mark Sargent, a middle-aged, balding man who still lives with his mother and depends on her to feed him. Sargent spouts one incredible claim after another, sitting in his mother’s basement obsessing over little details and posting hundreds of YouTube videos expounding his ideas. He claims as proof of the flat earth that he can see skyscrapers from his mother’s Whidbey Island backyard. However, Whidbey Island is less than forty-eight kilometers (about thirty miles) from downtown Seattle, too close to detect the curvature.
Sargent describes how he obsessed for three solid days trying to track aircraft online that flew near or across the South Pole and then decided there weren’t any such flights. According to Sargent, this proves that Antarctica is not a continent on the South Pole but a giant ice wall on the perimeter of the flat earth. (Later in the same part of the movie, a Caltech grad student pulls up a different flight