Episode 2: The Flat Earth Incident - Part 2

Last time we talked about Samuel Rowbotham and how his time at a Utopian commune in the West Norfolk fens kickstarted his career as a flat earther, and where we left off he had been giving talks to mixed receptions, some attendees going to take the piss, others motivated by genuine curiosity (although it's worth remembering that both groups paid exactly the same for admission). For the next part of the story, we'll look at two of the followers that this remarkable man attracted.

We'll start with William Carpenter. Carpenter was a printer by profession, and rather keen on Spiritualism (that is to say, communicating with the dead, seances and Ouija boards and all that.), mesmerism (the belief that all living things possess a mysterious life force that can be used for healing), and phrenology (i.e. working out what people's personalities are like by measuring their heads.). All of these were very popular with the Victorians, and they will all probably show up in more episodes. He started a journal, the Spiritual Messenger, devoted to these things. In its first issue, in September 1858, he described the three of them together as 'the noblest sciences that can engage the attention of man' and 'glorious truths now spreading their welcome influence over those who dare to think for themselves'.

Given his inclinations, it's hardly surprising that in 1861 he went to one of Rowbotham's lectures, and plunged straight down the Zetetic rabbit hole. In 1864, he came out with his first pamphlet, under the pseudonym “common sense”, entitled Earth Not A Globe, and in verse. Rather disappointingly, I wasn't able to find the actual text of the pamphlet, but thankfully (or perhaps not) in his 200-page book 'Theoretical Astronomy Examined and Exposed', he opens with 3 pages of it.

The beginning:

“TIME WAS, they said the Earth was flat; but now they say it's round!
But strange enough, though true, it is, no PROOF has yet been found.
Astronomers will tell you, if you ask them, o'er and o'er,
Proofs are by no means wanting, by the dozen or the score.
COPERNICUS has told us this, and NEWTON, and the rest
And people say These are the men who, surely, should know best!'
HERSCHEL, indeed, says, in his book, We'll take it all for granted;
But COMMON SENSE says, now-a-days, that something else is wanted.”

Herschel is in this case the astronomer, chemist, photographer and philosopher of science John Herschel, the son of the more famous astronomer and musician William Herschel, best known for discovering Uranus.

Herschel's Treatise does indeed neglect to supply explicit proof of the Copernican system, saying

“We shall take for granted, from the outset, the Copernican system of the world; relying on the easy, obvious, and natural explanation it affords of all the phenomena as they come to be described, to impress the student with a sense of its truth”

Carpenter's poem also takes aim at the astronomer royal George Airy himself at one point, who we mentioned in the last episode as taking the time to respond to every single piece of correspondence he received from members of the public about the content of Samuel Rowbotham's lectures:

“Professor AIRY, in his Lectures, says, "young men, Do you believe it?"
We answer, No!' and tell him, he himself need not conceive it.”

He ends up spending quite a lot of Theoretical Astronomy laying into Herschel and Airy, who he seems to take as figureheads of globe-earthism and mainstream science in general. Modern flat earthers often talk about current science communicators in a similar way, associating the globe model closely with people like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Back to Carpenter's poem, another thing we can see is that the honestly admirable triumphant anti-elitist sentiment that drove the origins of the flat-earth movement is peppered throughout:

“The Truth is mighty, and shall win the crown, and then shall wear it,
No matter who shall scoff and frown, and say they cannot bear it.
Reform begins outside the Institutions that require it,
And springs of honest hearts that love the Truth and most desire it.
A change is coming o'er the minds of men who have been slaved;
And from piteous delusions many spirits shall be saved.
Astronomers who say the Earth's a globe must prove it,
Or else for ever from the books for youth must they remove it.”

The rest of Theoretical Astronomy is (fortunately) prose, and is impassioned and rambling, comprised of several pamphlets assembled together, with fairly standard flat-earth arguments. For an example of his style, take this section, immediately following a few pages about how the official figures for the distance from Earth to the Sun and for the speed of light have kept changing recently (which obviously means they must just be making them up).

“The Reverend Secretary says, "instead of saying 'down with astronomy, and up with theology,' we ought to be thankful," and so on: in fact, it is the modern tale, wrapped in fine language, telling us that we must be still more proud of astronomy ; that God's Word must be bent to man's masterly discoveries; and that still more must theology go down! - Never! What, for a science like this?—a science which shall be proved to have no foundation in fact? Never! The crisis has past. The sun, surely, can never again go so far from us - though but in theory; as the pale moon belongs to us, so shall the Sun be our Sun - as Our Father has told us “to rule over the day and over the night" ; and the time shall come when "TEKEL: thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting," shall not be found, as it now is, inscribed over the forehead of Astronomy.”

Now for the second of our two second-generation Flat-Earthers.

John Hampden was the son of a vicar from Swindon, Wiltshire. He had dropped out of Oxford University, and then it's not clear what happened to him, but in 1869, Hampden, a hardcore Biblical Literalist, stumbled upon Rowbotham's book Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not A Globe. He embraced the Zetetic philosophy pretty much instantly. He read Carpenter's Theoretical Astronomy Examined and Exposed next, and then he bought the copyright to Zetetic Astronomy for £100, presumably wanting to print more copies. Carpenter had taken three years from his conversion to issue his first pamphlet, but Hampden managed it that very same year, with The Popularity of Error and the Unpopularity of Truth: Showing the World to be a Stationary Plane and not a Revolving Globe.

This consists of a heavily-abridged 8-page version of Samuel Rowbotham's Zetetic Astronomy, followed by an 'appendix' by Hampden himself. Hampden's style is as fanatical and as infused with religious zealotry as Carpenter's, and makes for a jarring contrast with Rowbotham's measured efforts to at least try and sound like a scientist. He allows Rowbotham to give scientific-sounding arguments (such as that the calculations used by surveyors treat the curvature of the Earth as negligible, or that everything doesn't flip upside down when you sail into the Southern Hemisphere), while he mostly handles the religious invective, such as the claim that

“The thinking men of England are slowly being awakened to the fact that The Church's divinity consists chiefly in a medley of Popish and Pagan mummery” .

“Both Isaiah, Job, Solomon and David, in all their references to the Sun and to the Earth, speak of the motion of the one and the immobility of the other. So does every writer, from Moses to John of Patmos. Dare we, then, venture to accuse these inspired historians of ignorance, or rather of making statements directly contrary to the evidence of their senses? No! May our united answer be “let God be true, and every man a liar” who speaks not according to his word.”

Now, Hampden shall be one of two protagonists in the next stage of our story, and the other, a man you may already have heard of, and who I expect will feature elsewhere in this podcast for largely unrelated reasons: Alfred Russel Wallace.

Wallace was, and indeed still is, a towering figure in the history of biology. After starting out as a surveyor, he had pivoted into a career as a self-taught naturalist In 1862, he had returned from 8 years in Southeast Asia, where he had travelled around the islands that now comprise Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, recording the local plants and animals and collecting specimens. His observation that the islands of Bali and Lombok, east of Java, which are only 25 miles apart, are home to completely different bird species, led to the discovery of what is known as the 'Wallace Line', demarcating the areas populated by Asian species from the transitional region known as 'Wallacea', populated by a mixture of Asian and Australasian species.

While in the East Indies, he had also arrived, independently of Darwin, at a theory of evolution by natural selection, and his letters to Darwin about it prompted Darwin, who had (completely independently) been thinking along the same lines for years, to move much faster to publish On the Origin of Species. In the end Wallace was impressively gracious in letting Darwin take credit for the discovery, and their findings were presented jointly.

Back in England, Wallace became a passionate defender of Darwin, and also believed in ghosts.

That's right. Wallace, much like William Carpenter, took a keen interest in the occult. He attended his first séance in 1865, and in 1866 his sister's lodger apparently turned out to possess her own supernatural powers. Before long, Wallace was hosting seances at his own house, with his sister's lodger, Agnes Nichol, as the star of the show. She made the table levitate, she conjured unexplained music, she produced flowers as if from thin air, at one point they turned the lights off and when they turned them back on her chair was now on top of the table, right in the middle, with her sat in it.

Wallace wrote all this up in several articles and pamphlets on the subject, and needless to say provoked some controversy among his scientific peers. While it was more socially acceptable in the 1860s than it is now for a respectable scientist to believe in paranormal phenomena, it was still a bit weird. Darwin made fun of him for it, as did Thomas Henry Huxley (probably best-known as a fellow defender of Darwin in the natural selection controversy, and for his infamous debate on the subject with bishop Thomas Wilberforce), and the botanist Joseph Hooker.

Possibly eager to salvage his reputation and distance himself from people with even weirder views than his own, and also struggling financially (he didn't have the private income of his gentleman-naturalist peers such as Darwin, and without a university degree he couldn't pursue a career in academia), in 1870 he came across an advert in the journal Scientific Opinion.

“What is to be said of the pretended philosophy of the 19th Century, when not one educated man in ten thousand knows the shape of the Earth on which he dwells? Why, it must be a huge sham! The undersigned is willing to deposit from £50 to £500, on reciprocal terms, and defies all the philosophers, divines and scientific professors in the United Kingdom to prove the rotundity and revolution of the world from Scripture, from reason or from fact. He will acknowledge that he has forfeited his deposit, if his opponent can exhibit, to the satisfaction of any intelligent referee, a convex railway, river, canal or lake.”

Who was this from, but our very own John Hampden.

Wallace wanted to accept, and wrote to his friend, the geologist Charles Lyell to make sure. Lyell thought it was a good idea, saying that “it may stop these foolish people to have it shown to them”, so Wallace went ahead. Wallace suggested they use Lake Bala, in North Wales, among the peaks of Eryri, but Hampden had another idea. He suggested we go back to where this story started - back to Norfolk, to the Old Bedford River, beneath that vast fenland firmament, where Samuel Rowbotham had made his first measurements at the Manea Fen Colony.

Each participant appointed a referee. Wallace chose John Henry Walsh, the editor of the hunting magazine The Field, while Hampden selected none other than William Carpenter. Wallace doesn't seem to have been aware at the time that Carpenter was a friend of Hampden and himself a notorious flat-earther, and probably wouldn't have agreed to let him referee if he had known (despite their shared passion for the paranormal), especially given the condition that the referee should not be 'a personal acquaintance of your own'. Interestingly enough, Carpenter himself saw Wallace's shared occult interests, and alienation from the mainstream scientific community as a potential way in, he saw Wallace as a potential Flat Earther.

“And it's Mr Wallace The Spiritualist, after all. I am a Spiritualist. Surely we ought to agree: But then, he is a believer in the Earth's rotundity and I am not! If he becomes convinced of the popular error, what a price he will have to pay for it! What a good thing it is that he is a Spiritualist: He knows, at all events, how to turn from the popular opinion, and will make a valuable addition to the Zetetic ranks. He won't mind having to pay five-hundred pounds.”

On February 28th, 1870, Wallace and Carpenter arrived in Downham Market, 2-and-a-half miles from where the experiment would take place. The next day, they rode to the Old Bedford Bridge, on the canal where this whole strange escapade began 30 years earlier.

The experiment was like this: on the river-bank, along the completely straight 6-mile stretch from the Old Bedford Bridge to Welney Bridge, they would place posts at intervals of a mile, with red-and-black markers exactly 6 feet above the surface of the water. They would then look along the row with a telescope. On a flat earth, the markers would be lined up, but on a round earth, if you pointed the telescope at the furthest marker that you could see, the markers in between would appear above the line of sight, rising to the middle and then descending.

They spent the day trudging along the riverbank in a bracing Siberian wind, pacing out the miles between the posts, hacking away plants that would be in the way of the view. I can imagine Wallace comparing his situation now, in frosty East Anglian fields, beneath a huge, uninterrupted, grey Fenland sky, to his adventures making serious scientific contributions in the tropical forest of the Malay Archipelago. They returned to the Crown Hotel in Downham Market, where they met Walsh, and the next day they were joined by Hampden himself for the experiment.

The next morning, at the Old Bedford Bridge, the four of them set about lining up the telescope on a barge. Meticulously moving the barge forward and backward, left and right, propping the tripod up on sandbags, while a crowd of locals on the bridge observed this bizarre scene with bemused fascination. At one point they thought they had it lined up and then Carpenter nudged the tripod and it went again, and then they got it lined up again, and then Carpenter objected because the telescope didn't have cross-hairs that could be used to make sure it was level. Wallace (who had been a surveyor and a civil engineer before he became a naturalist, so presumably knew what he was doing) argued that it wasn’t necessary, but it was all meaningless anyway because when they looked through the telescope it was complete chaos. There were supposed to be five signals, but they could only see two of them, and couldn’t tell which they were. There were two disks lined up with the toll board on the bridge, which was seven feet high, but the posts were only supposed to be 6 feet high, so it wasn’t clear what they were at all. When they looked again, one of the signs appeared to be just two-and-a-half inches above the water, but then a boy told them (and I won’t attempt to do an old-fashioned East Anglia accent, much as Carpenter suggests one with his spellings) “That post be knocked down, maaster, and Oi put it up again!”.

Anyway, this would tell them absolutely nothing about whether or not the Earth was curved.

That night, in the Crown Hotel, of course they set about arguing, and Walsh (quite reasonably) seems to have called into question Carpenter's credentials as an impartial referee. In Carpenter's own words:

“I should like Mr Walsh to know the amount of curvature which is supposed to exist in six miles, and, consequently, the concession which is made to Mr Wallace in the matter of the five feet more or less which he talks of showing. But no: He will have none of it! It is a “new” subject to him, quite. Perhaps he is right, after all: What business has a journeyman printer to instruct an editor? The idea! Did it not almost cause a rupture in proceedings, when, in conversation, last evening, I expressed myself as having an opinion touching the point at issue! What right have I to an opinion - whilst it differs from his! Forsooth, I am a prejudiced individual, and unfit for the office of referee! Perhaps he is right, again: and though, of course, he is as much prejudiced in behalf of his own way of thinking, it matters not since his way is the popular - the editorial - the right way! What a hard nut to crack is the unpopular nut!”

But eventually, they hammered out an agreement. The original system had been unworkable, so the new system would be much simpler. They would place a marker on Welney Bridge, at a height of 13-and-a-half feet above the water, and look towards a marker at the same height, attached the Old Bedford Bridge. Half way between, there would be a third marker, on a post at the same height again. Wallace and Walsh, the globers, predicted that the middle marker would appear about 5 feet above the line of sight between the two bridges, while Hampden and Carpenter, in their flat-earth system, predicted that the post would be lined up with the line of sight.

This has a big advantage over the first set-up in that there's much less that can go wrong. There's only one post that you have to position correctly and make sure it doesn't get knocked over, you can't get mixed up about which posts you're looking at, if you're looking from the bridge, then you don't have to worry about keeping a barge steady, and the post being much higher is less likely to be obstructed by vegetation and less affected by atmospheric refraction bending the light rays coming from it and interfering with lines of sight that were supposed to be straight. Wallace seems to have had great difficulty explaining this to the flat-earthers with diagrams, but eventually they agreed to it.

Walsh (probably to his relief by this point) had to go back to London the next morning, so as a replacement referee on Wallace's side, they brought in Martin Coulcher, a local surgeon and amateur astronomer. They spent that day in King's Lynn, trying to get hold of a surveyor's telescope with crosshairs that the flat-earth contingent had insisted on. They spent the next day, a misty Friday, setting up the experiment - just one pole this time, and white calico sheets with black stripes attached to the bridges.

On Saturday they were ready - for real, this time. They finished off the last bit of setting up, putting a marker 13 and a half feet above the water on the middle pole, and headed to Welney Bridge to make observations. Of course they had the same argument again about the telescope, with Wallace trying to use the same one as last time, but Carpenter insisting they needed the new one with crosshairs, Wallace said the crosshairs had nothing to do with it, Carpenter said they did, and that they should use the new telescope from King's Lynn - 'A beautiful piece of mechanism', as Carpenter calls it, 'with every necessary appliance'.

Wallace and Coulcher had both looked through the original telescope and made a sketch, showing the central marker five feet above the bridge, exactly as he had predicted. Carpenter also looked through Wallace's telescope, and agreed to sign Wallace and Coulcher's diagram, “to the effect that it is like what is seen through that telescope, in that position, but that it is utterly useless for the purpose of this experiment”.

Wallace suggested getting the local parson to adjudicate whether or not cross-hairs were in fact necessary, but Carpenter was having none of it. Carpenter says that Wallace, in his frustration started dismantling Carpenter's telescope. At this point, Carpenter quotes a local saying (and again, I'm not doing the accent, as much as Carpenter seems to want me to) “Oi say, Bill, they want to say the water ain't level. Oi know it is though. Oi've been here these ten years, and oi know if 'tain't level there's no level anywhere”. More of the Zetetic movement's common-sense, anti-elitist philosophy on display there.

The telescope went back up, and Coulcher looked through it, and made a sketch, which both him and Carpenter signed. They took the same observation (with Carpenter's telescope, of course) from the other bridge. Carpenter's account in the pamphlet Water not Convex isn't very clear about what he actually saw. “All three objects in a line”, “The three points are splendidly in line, and appear equidistant in the field of view”, “There are the three points in a regular series, so nearly equidistant that the sharpest vision could not detect a fault, one slightly above the other in either case.”

Reproductions of Carpenter and Coulcher's diagrams, printed in the cover of this volume, in Wallace's autobiography, and pretty much everywhere to do with the experiment make it a bit clearer. The crosshairs are in the middle (obviously, that's how crosshairs work), the post is below them (or above them, given that the telescope inverted the images), and the marker on the bridge is below (or above) that.

Over the weekend, Walsh, back in London, introduced the public to these shenanigans with a piece in his magazine The Field, somewhat out of place in a hunting and fishing magazine.

“The theory is so opposed to numberless facts well-known to scientific men that no member of the latter class has until now, as far as we know, thought it worth confuting”

is how he introduced the flat-earth concept. He congratulated Hampden and Carpenter on “The good faith and perfect fairness with which they have consented to test this experiment” and “Their willingness to throw away every obstacle likely to impede a fair decision.” Of course, bear in mind Walsh had left before the cross-hair incident and the new experimental design.

On Monday, they were still in Downham Market. This time they were in Coulcher's house. According to the terms of the wager, in order for a winner to be decided, the two referees had to be in agreement. Obviously they weren't - Coulcher understood basic geometry and Carpenter was a hardcore flat-earther, after all. Coulcher signed a statement saying that he thought Wallace was right.

The terms of the wager had said that if the referees disagreed, they should appoint a third umpire, but Carpenter had not disagreed, but refused to officially confirm that there was a disagreement at all - he still thought he could persuade Coulcher that he had shown Earth was flat. This all ended up in Coulcher sending his servant to the police station.

Carpenter read out a statement he had already prepared, saying that Wallace hadn't shown Earth was round.

Carpenter gives the following dialogue after he had read out the statement:

“You cannot find any objection to that statement, Mr Coulcher.”
“I do: I say the whole thing is a gross falsehood from beginning to end. I will not sign a falsehood.”
“Well, then, Mr Coulcher, show me the falsehood and I will sign in your favour directly.”
“No, you won't.”
“Yes, I will! Show me the falsehood, and I'll sign in your favour directly.”
“The line of sight from the parapet of Welney Bridge, 13ft 4in above the water line, to the signal post on the Old Bedford Bridge, did not cut the signal-post situated in the middle of the distance, in the centre…”
“Where, then, did it cut it?” Carpenter interrupted.
Coulcher continued. “…But showed the upper red signal fully five feet above the signal on the Old Bedford Bridge.”
“You're speaking of the inverting telescope?”
“Yes.”
“Where was the horizontal crosshair situated?”
“You can put that anywhere you like!”
“We saw them all, together, in a line.”
“I did not say so. I tell you that the centre signal was five feet above the bridge. I have my report. Mr Wallace has demonstrated to me why it is so, and you cannot agree, therefore we met to appoint an umpire.” .

And it goes on, until a police officer actually shows up and presumably shuts down this whole extremely weird affair.

Of course, this was hardly the end of it, and we're going to see how the argument played out back in London.

Thank you for listening, come back next time to hear about what happens next.

Episode 2: The Flat Earth Incident - Part 2

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