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If you go to the fens of East Anglia, the most obvious thing you'll notice is how flat it is. No hills at all. No mounds or hillocks or humps or tumps or wolds. It's just flat. Once upon a time, this was all swampland. Impenetrable marshes that you could only get around by boat. Ely was an island, and Anglo-Saxon monks built a monastery there on this small habitable patch amid the marshes that developed into its magnificent cathedral. When William the Conqueror laid waste to England, it was in these strange marshes that Hereward held out against the invaders, using the terrain to evade the Normans who knew little of its ways.

It was not until the 1600s that serious efforts began to be made to transform this landscape. In the 1630s, a group of rich locals, the “Gentleman Adventurers”, made a plan drain the fens. The engineer Cornelius Vermuyden was called in, from where else but the Netherlands, to pump the water out as his compatriots had from their own waterlogged nation.

Locals resisted.

The Fen Tigers, as they called them, broke down dykes to flood once more the land where they and their ancestors had for centuries lived by hunting and fishing, and that they saw being turned into farmland to profit a few landowners.

But nonetheless the project continued. Dykes went up, windmills started spinning, and canals were dug to drain the water away.

The Old Bedford River was one of the first of these canals to be dug, planned by Vermuyden himself and named after the Duke of Bedford who paid for it, to carry water drained from the fens into the Great Ouse river, which empties into the North Sea at Kings Lynn.

The Old Bedford River extends for 21 miles, still, mostly straight, and very, very flat.

In 1838, a few miles South-West of here, the local farmer and Methodist minister William Hodson, inspired by the ideas of the early socialist Robert Owen, established a utopian colony at Manea Fen. The aim was to build a society based on equality, and common ownership of land and resources.

The scheme was controversial from the beginning, even among Owenites. The president of the Owenite National Community Friendly Society attempted to distance the movement as a whole from Hodson's ideas, writing in the Owenite newspaper the New Moral World that

"It is all under the entire control of Mr. Hodson and has no further connection with the body of the Socialists than they individually may think it proper to form."

Robert Owen himself was more sympathetic to it in principle, but still didn't think there were enough people for it to actually work.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, it was not a success. It started badly, with the colonists earning a reputation for being lazy drunks. According to one observer, writing in the commune's own newspaper the Working Bee later on after they had got rid of the worst offenders,

"a worse selection of persons for carrying out any great object of this description than the parties who have left this establishment it would be impossible to make".

It got better, they built houses, and a windmill, they set up a school, and a chemical laboratory, good weather meant the crops they grew did well, and they were close to paying back the money that Hodson had put in to set the colony up. Then it started to go badly again. Some of the community fell out with Hodson, but still depended on his money, Hodson started cutting off supplies, pro-Hodson and anti-Hodson factions formed, it eventually collapsed into physical violence. According to an 1841 article in the New Moral World,

"Men with bludgeons have constantly been about the premises; the shops and rooms have been broken into and their contents taken out. Nearly all the members have now resigned. The remainder are determined to obtain possession if they can."

With that, this nobly intentioned scheme collapsed. However, in its short lifetime it had attracted a remarkable resident by the name of Samuel Rowbotham.

Samuel Rowbotham, an Owenite Socialist from a family of Manchester industrialists, was 21 when he saw Hodson's 1838 advert in the New Moral World. He met Hodson, and became a leading advocate of the Manea Fen scheme, ending up as the colony's secretary, and while he was there these flat lands became the site of an extraordinary endeavour.

If you have remembered from a minute or so ago, the Manea Fen Colony stood beside the Old Bedford River - a canal that runs between the fenland fields, perfectly straight for 6 miles. His aim was to take advantage of this property test something he had, according to his own later accounts, suspected since childhood - that Earth is flat.

During the winter of 1837-1838, Rowbotham describes how he was able to see people skating on the frozen Old Bedford River “at known distances of four to eight miles” - I will note here that Rowbotham writes that this was in the winter preceding the summer of 1838, but Hodson's advert in the New Moral World that persuaded Rowbotham to join the Manea Fen Colony wasn't published until the Summer of 1838, so I'm not sure what's going on there - but Rowbotham's point was that, if the surface of the Earth was curved, those skaters should be hidden behind that curvature.

He carried out a series of experiments, all to do with lines of sight along the Old Bedford River. In one he placed a flag 5 feet tall on a boat that sailed in a straight line along the river, 6 miles from Welche's Dam to Welney Bridge. Standing waist-deep in the river, bent over with a telescope 8 inches above the surface of the water, Rowbotham watched the boat sailing the whole way. In his own words:

“The flag and the boat were distinctly visible throughout the whole distance! There could be no mistake as to the distance passed over, as the man in charge of the boat had instructions to lift one of his oars to the top of the arch the moment he reached the bridge. The experiment commenced about three o'clock in the afternoon of a summer's day, and the sun was shining brightly and nearly behind or against the boat during the whole of its passage. Every necessary condition had been fulfilled, and the result was to the last degree definite and satisfactory. The conclusion was unavoidable that the surface of the water for a length of six miles did not to any appreciable extent decline or curvate downwards from the line of sight.”

By Rowbotham's calculations, given the dimensions of Earth according to the globe model, the boat ought to have been 16 feet below the horizon at a distance of 6 miles, and the flag ought to have been well-hidden. The fact that it was not confirmed to Rowbotham what he was no doubt already pretty much certain of - that he was right and basically every educated European since antiquity was wrong.

Rowbotham's other experiments on the Old Bedford River were along similar lines. Each time, he claimed, he was able to see much more than his calculations based on the conventional understanding of the geometry of Earth would predict.

Of course, there was no question of Rowbotham keeping such groundbreaking findings to himself. He told the rest of the colonists, he even tried to use his position as secretary to make it an official position of the Manea Fen Colony that Earth is flat. Needless to say, this proved somewhat controversial, leading to factions emerging, with William Hodson, the colony's founder, on whom it was largely financially dependent, backing Rowbotham for some reason. There was a committee meeting that involved Rowbotham apparently pulling a gun on the committee, and he was subsequently thrown out of the commune in August 1839.

After delivering a few flat earth lectures to presumably bemused spectators in Wisbech, Rowbotham and his gang of flat-earthers cast out of Manea Fen, moved to London, and we don't know what happened to them, until three years later in 1842, when Rowbotham re-emerges with a pamphlet entitled An Inquiry into the Cause of Natural Death, or Death from Old Age, and Developing an Entirely New and Certain Method of Preserving Active and Healthful Life for an Extraordinary Period. I suppose you're probably expecting this pamphlet to be rigorously researched and firmly grounded in well-established science, where the author has taken great care to avoid printing any wildly ambitious claims with no plausible scientific basis.

Of course this was not the case. An Inquiry into the Cause of Natural Death, or Death from Old Age, and Developing an Entirely New and Certain Method of Preserving Active and Healthful Life for an Extraordinary Period argues that aging and death are the results of “the accumulation of solid earthy matter”, by which he seems to mean various calcium salts, that he claims clog up the body. According to the Inquiry, and an enlarged 1845 edition, it is possible to substantially prolong life (and possibly theoretically attain immortality) by following a particular diet, eating more fruit, vegetables, meat and cider, and avoiding salt and wheat bread (which he calls “the staff of death”).

Rowbotham's adventures in weird pseudomedicine seem to have been the main thing that occupied him during the 1840s, but aren't what we're concerned with here, so we can move on to 1849, when on January 15 he delivered a lecture at the Mechanics Institute in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, where he laid out an elaborate cosmological system centred the idea of the Earth being flat.

Rowbotham's model is essentially similar to the models used by modern flat-earthers. The continents are arranged around the North Pole, and the South Pole is entirely absent, with what the Globe model holds to be the continent of Antarctica in fact being an impenetrable wall of ice surrounding the Earth and keeping the ocean from falling off the Edge.

The interior of Antarctica was completely unexplored in Samuel Rowbotham's day, so this didn't present an issue to him, but modern flat-earthers will tell you either that Antarctic expeditions are completely fake, or that they simply travel from one point on the Antarctic coast to another on a route that doesn't go anywhere near the Edge. Also interestingly, they will often claim the Antarctic Treaty, with the aim of hiding the Edge, forbids private individuals from travelling to the interior of Antarctica. I have so far been unable to find such a clause in the Antarctic treaty, which is seven pages long and available for free online.

But I digress. In Rowbotham's system, the Sun and Moon are relatively close to the Earth, and using the angles of the Sun and Moon above the horizon from various locations (assuming the Earth is flat, if Earth is spherical then the results are totally different) he demonstrated that they are less than 4,000 miles above the surface of Earth. They revolve around the North Pole, in circles that change in diameter throughout the year, which is how Rowbotham explains variations in the angle of the Sun above the horizon at different latitudes and at different times of year. In order to always take 24 hours to go round, the Sun moves faster when it’s above the Southern Hemisphere than above the Northern Hemisphere. As evidence for this, Rowbotham cites several writers observing how twilight in New Zealand doesn’t last very long.

The moon, according to Rowbotham (and many modern flat-earthers) doesn't reflect the light of the sun, but emits its own light. Rowbotham claimed that moonlight, unlike sunlight, causes the temperatures of things exposed to it to fall (a concept that obviously makes no physical sense, since it would involve the light having a negative energy).

It's easy enough to find videos online of modern-day cold moonlight believers carrying out experiments in which they go out at night with a thermometer and measure a very slightly higher temperature in the shade than in moonlight. This can be explained by measuring temperatures on different surfaces, that absorb and radiate heat differently, or by measuring temperatures where the thing blocking the moonlight is also keeping heat a surface has absorbed during the day from being radiated back into the atmosphere.

Interestingly, I found an article where the author had done a series of better moonlight temperature measurements and found that when you control for everything else the temperature of moonlight is too small to measure, in the Creationist Answers Research Journal of all places. The rivalry between flat-earthers and more normal creationists is fascinating, with the Creationists saying that the Flat Earthers (who are almost invariably Creationists themselves) are making Creationists look silly, and particularly in light of the old enlightenment myth that medieval people believed earth was flat because the Bible says so (and yes, that is absolutely a myth. The intellectual consensus in Medieval Europe and the Middle East was very much that Earth is round) they need to distance themselves from the Flat-Earthers.

But this is another tangent. Back to Trowbridge, 1849. In the words of the Wiltshire Independent, reporting on Rowbotham's inaugural lecture:

"These absurdities were followed by others still more absurd, such as that the sun was gradually nearing the Earth, would ultimately consume all its oxygen and then go out, but phosphorus would so impregnate the atmosphere and all things that there would be universal light, and every human being would be a brilliant walking luminary. Then that as there would be no oxygen to consume animal matter, men would require no food, contract no disease, and consequently never die.

Rowbotham's account of the end of the world seems to have shifted from this later, and the account he published in 1865 was perhaps not quite as weird as the one he gave at Trowbridge (although still extremely weird), and essentially amounts to: There is a load of fire underneath the Earth, which is how volcanoes work (and to be fair, he's pretty much spot on on that particular point), and it follows from this that the Earth can at some point be expected to just sort of burst into flames.

Rowbotham continued touring the country, giving Flat Earth lectures. At one point in Burnley in Lancashire a spectator challenged him on why the hulls of ships disappear before their masts. He couldn't answer, but promised he would be back with an answer in his next lecture the following day.

He didn't show up.

He kept going though, giving more lectures, publishing a pamphlet called Zetetic Astronomy: A Description of Several Experiments which Prove that the Surface of the Sea Is a Perfect Plane and that the Earth Is Not a Globe!, where he described some of the experiments he had done on the Old Bedford River, failing to observe the drop predicted by the globe model when using a theodolite to view a boat travelling away.

The word he used in the title, “Zetetic”, derived from the Greek Zetetikos, meaning 'inquisitive', was the name he gave to his method of reasoning, claiming to reject the conventional scientific method, which Rowbotham accused of

"framing a theory or system and assuming the existence of causes for which there is no direct evidence, and which can only be admitted 'for the sake of argument'", .

and instead to proceed by

"making special experiments and collecting manifest and undeniable facts".

I suppose in this rejection of scientific authority, we can see an egalitarian approach to knowledge, that reflects Rowbotham's Socialist background - indeed, the word 'zetetic' had earlier been used by a network of 'zetetic societies', a radical movement campaigning against censorship by the British government in the wake of the French Revolution. Anyone could find the truth, and there was no reason to trust one person's word just because they had gone to university, over the evidence of your own senses.

In that sense the late 1840s were the perfect time for Rowbotham's ideas to catch on. A series of revolutions had enveloped Europe. In Poland, Hungary, Sicily, people had risen up against their rulers. Right across Germany, barricades had gone up in the streets and the new black, red and gold Tricolour made its debut. In France, King Louis Philippe had ignominiously fled Paris to an exile in England, and in Salford the political discussions of two lavishly-bearded German expatriates, apparently largely taking place in The Crescent, on Chapel Street, crystallised into a certain rather well-known pamphlet. So people were talking about radical ideas, people were challenging established authority, and while in general this was mostly a good thing, there were inevitably some people who took this attitude in weird directions.

Christine Garwood, in Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea, makes another point about why the time was right for the Flat Earth movement to take off when it did, and this is that the period was also a revolutionary time in the History of Science.

New ideas about geology were put forward in Charles Lyell's 1833 Principles of Geology, that posed a serious challenge to the view that Earth was created, fully formed, from nothing, a few thousand years ago. Ideas about evolution, that reached their climax in 1858, roughly simultaneous with the climax of Rowbotham's career, with the publication of On the Origin of Species, were causing further difficulties.

It would be easy for someone whose whole identity was based on belief in the literal truth of the bible to feel under attack in such an environment, and Rowbotham's zetetic method might seem, on a superficial level at least, to provide suitable intellectual tools to resist such an onslaught.

Rowbotham himself approached Flat Earth from a Biblical Literalist perspective, at one point publishing a pamphlet entitled The Inconsistency of Modern Astronomy and Opposition to the Scriptures, in which he puts forward a series of Bible quotes that he says demonstrate that the Bible says Earth is Flat. I would tell you some of the arguments he makes, but I can't actually find a copy of the pamphlet, or a detailed description of its contents (although it is mentioned in several other sources).

In his Magnum Opus - Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not A Globe, where he essentially lays out the ideas I have already described, Rowbotham backs up his claims with biblical quotations - for instance, he supports the claim that the light of the Sun and of the Moon are completely different and independent of each other with a quote from Saint Paul:

"there is one glory of the sun and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars, for one star differeth from another star in glory."

And a quote from the Book of Revelation:

"The sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood.",

pointing out in the second case that if the moon reflected the light of the sun then when the sun became black the moon would also have to become black.

A particularly interesting example is the following, from the 1881 edition:

"As the earth is a globe and in continual motion, how could Jesus, on being 'taken up into an exceedingly high mountain, see all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time? Or when 'He cometh with clouds and every eye shall see Him,' how was it possible, seeing that twenty-four hours would have to elapse before every part of the earth would be turned to the same point?

"It has been demonstrated that the earth is a plane and motionless; and, therefore, it was consistent with geodetic and optical principles to declare that from a great eminence every part of the surface could be seen at the same moment, and that simultaneously every eye should behold Him when 'coming in a cloud, with power and great glory.'"

Here we can see very clearly Rowbotham talking about religious concepts in scientific and mathematical terms, an effort to reconcile the scientific attitude of society at the time, of railways, steamships, telegrams, socialism and capitalism, with the religious beliefs of many of its inhabitants. Medieval scholars had in many cases been content with thinking of certain sections of the Bible that contradicted established natural philosophy as metaphorical or allegorical (as Galileo famously said, the Bible tells us 'how to go to Heaven, not how the Heavens go'), or instead to make allowances for divine miracles that override ordinary natural laws.

But as the scientific method became more robust, I suppose these answers became less acceptable to many people. By the mid-19th Century, I think most religious people who thought about it would have claimed, just like their medieval forebears, that the Bible verses that imply Earth is flat ought not to be taken completely literally - and we can see a more well-known and well-documented conflict between literal and allegorical interpretations of scripture in light of a generally rationalistic worldview at about the same time in debates about evolution - but to some people like Rowbotham (or at least, his followers - there's some doubt about whether Rowbotham himself actually believed what he was saying or whether he was just doing it for attention and to sell tickets to his lectures) that was unacceptable. Scientific truth is the only truth. The Bible is completely, literally true. Therefore the Bible must be in agreement with science, and science must be in agreement with the Bible.

To the Victorian Flat-Earthers, while they accepted both empirical investigation and scripture as valid sources of truth, the relationship between them was quite different to that held by mainstream scientifically-educated Christians. To them, metaphorical interpretation of the Bible was much less acceptable, and if science contradicted the Bible, it must be the science that was wrong, grounded in too many assumptions and theories, and after the obfuscation of scientific elites had been stripped away, correctly-conducted experiments would always confirm the truth of scripture.

Back to the story. Alongside his day job making soap and selling various quack remedies, Rowbotham continued touring, using the pseudonym Parallax (presumably a reference to stellar parallax, the slight difference in the positions of stars in the sky throughout the year resulting from Earth's movement around the sun, predicted by the Copernican system that the flat-earthers rejected, but so small that it wasn't successfully measured until 1832, and flat-earthers to this day still deny that it has been measured at all). He gave lectures throughout the country to a decidedly mixed reception (and also found the time to file a patent for a 'life-preserving cylindrical railway carriage', in which a passenger compartment hangs freely from the central axle of a rolling cylinder that the locomotive hauls along the tracks).

In 1856, the Norfolk News reports on an experiment where a 'committee' including Parallax observed the apparent position of the horizon from the beach at Cromer and then from the top of the lighthouse, to check for the dip in the level of the horizon that would be predicted by the globe model. The statement of the experimenters was as follows:

“Having visited Cromer to take observations of the dip of the horizon at different altitudes above the sea level, we succeeded in making one on the beach, the instrument being about five feet above the level of the sea, and we found the dip of the horizon to be one minute. The weather was so hazy when we reached the lighthouse that we were unable to see a well-defined horizon.”

And then an addendum:

“But so far as we did see, the surface of the water appeared to rise toward the line of sight.”

Well, there we have it. Absolutely irrefutable proof.

And in the next issue of the Norfolk News, we find that someone has attempted to repeat the experiment, with Rowbotham again present. It seems to have been too misty again, but they did manage to see some objects partly obscured by the horizon, as they should be on the Globe. The whole thing becomes a bit silly, with them once more arguing over the original Bedford Level experiments at Manea Fen, and Rowbotham claiming that he was promised more of his expenses would be covered than just the travel costs.

Many of Parallax's audience were perplexed by his superficially convincing arguments. Take as an example his argument that if the Earth were a rotating globe, it would be possible to travel from one place to another, very quickly, by simply going up in a hot air balloon and waiting for the Earth to rotate under you (modern Flat-Earthers more often use a helicopter in the same argument).

I would hazard a guess that the average layperson couldn't convincingly answer why that doesn't work (it comes down to Newton's First Law. The balloon is already moving at the same speed as the surface of Earth, and when it goes up there isn't a force acting to stop it moving at that speed, much the same as if you jump on a high-speed train you don't go flying backwards at 100 miles per hour. Flat-Earthers usually say this is because the train, unlike the Globe Earth, is an 'enclosed space'. This has some truth in it because if you were to jump on the roof of the same train, you probably would go backwards, but only because the train is moving relative to the air around it, so you would be hit by what is effectively a 100 mile per hour wind.

Due to gravity, however, the Earth's atmosphere mostly moves with the Earth, especially at lower levels (except wind, obviously), so the balloon situation is more closely analogous to jumping inside the train.) Most people (including myself, probably until I did A-Level Physics when I was 16), I think, just assume that there must be someone out there who knows how it works. If someone goes on stage saying that it doesn't actually work, people are going to want answers, people are going to want to know why this person is wrong. Of course, Skeptics.stackexchange.com was still 150 years away, so some people's solution was to write directly to the Astronomer Royal.

The Astronomer Royal, George Biddell Airy, apparently diligently replied to every single letter, offering rebuttals to Parallax's arguments (rather disappointingly I couldn't actually find any copies of any of the letters either to or from Airy about the flat-earthers). Obviously he got letters from Flat Earthers as well, which he filed on a shelf labelled "My Asylum for Lunatics".

Of course, for all the opponents and confused neutrals Parallax attracted, he had his share of hardcore followers as well. There are two of these who are particularly important, who we'll introduce next time, and from here the story's mostly handed over to them.

Thank you for listening. Come back next time for the next part of the story.