Their test centered on a misinformed observation of boats at the far end of a six-mile canal, which they said could be seen without distortion or disappearing. One of those fanatics was a wealthy man named John Hampden, who, in cahoots with Rowbotham, published a challenge with a cash reward to anyone who could prove in an experiment that the Earth was not flat. In the mid to late 1800s, Rowbotham’s inaccurate claims about the Earth being flat caught the attention of likeminded anti-intellectuals who wanted literal proof of biblical events. Then in the 1950s, it was rebranded with the name we’re all now familiar with, the Flat Earth Society, which has experienced fluctuations in adherence until its most recent peak revival. Rowbotham cited evidence in the form of biblical scripture, fudged mathematical formulae, and faulty experiments designed to support Young Earth Creationist religious dogma – you know, the bizarre theory that the Earth was created some 10,000 years ago and dinosaurs existed alongside humans?Īnd Rowbotham’s ideas were posthumously preserved by one of his disciples who went so far as to create the Universal Zetetic Society (Zetetic is an obscure Greek/Latin word meaning “proceeding by inquiry”) that flourished up until WWI with its recurrent publication The Earth Not a Globe Review. One of the most famous Flat Earth arguments came after a man named Samuel Birley Rowbotham published a 16-page pamphlet that was later expanded into an 1865 book claiming the Earth was in fact flat. And we’re not just talking about its debate in times of antiquity flat Earth arguments began popping up millennia after Pythagoras proposed, and Aristotle later proved, the planet is indeed spherical. Though it may seem as if it spontaneously popped up out of nowhere sometime in the early aughts, the Flat Earth conspiracy theory’s roots extend back centuries in various forms.
Who Started the Flat Earth Theory What is the Flat Earth Theory?
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