New horizons are looming

The six million-plus Americans who believe the Earth is flat are clearly just seeing things.

- MATT VANCE

In 1798, Dr Nathaniel Vince and a small group of friends gathered on the shores of the English Channel and witnessed a strange thing. They were watching the barque Holstead, which had recently departed Ramsgate. The Holstead hovered above the horizon when, slowly, her masts inverted before disappearing in an instant as if she had toppled over the edge of the Earth. Vince and his friends were aghast and immediately reported what they'd witnessed to the harbour master. It was startling proof that the Earth is flat and surely the work of the devil himself.

Despite the Greek philosopher Eratosthenes’ proposal and measurement of a spherical Earth as early as 240 BCE, flat-Earth theories persisted in many cultures as a constant background belief. Strangely, it was the advent of Darwin's theory of evolution and its challenge to religious dogma during the late 1800s that led to the flourishing of modern flat-Earth theory.

It was the life and work of Samuel Rowbotham that best illustrates the fervour of these times. Rowbotham was an English inventor, utopian socialist, quack and soap boiler who, in 1849, published a 16-page pamphlet titled “Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe” under the pseudonym Parallax. He concluded that the Earth was a flat disk after finding a lack of curvature in his measurements of the drainage ditches of the Bedford Levels in Cambridgeshire. This emboldened him to launch into a career lecturing on his flat-Earth theories. He charged sixpence a head to attend his lectures and, over time, honed his debating skills to a fine edge, convincing many people of his hypothesis.