BUILDING A FORTEAN LIBRARY
100 Proofs of a flat Earth
Just as it is the lot of executioners and evangelists to walk among sinners, so it is the fate of forteans to mingle (if only on the page) with the slightly mad and, on occasion, with the wholly deluded. It is our settled opinion, whatever Charles Fort may have said on the subject – and we can’t recall if he said anything – that the Earth is an oblate spheroid, trundling around the Sun in an elliptical orbit. This was first shown by an ancient Greek or two, the 16th-century circumnavigator Magellan, and rather conclusively by some wonderful photographs taken more recently from space by sundry astronauts. Yet from about the mid-19th century on there has been a fluctuating band of mild obsessives who insist the Earth is flat, and produce their own idea of proofs that this is so. Back in late 2017, one Mike Hughes from California (where else) attempted to fire a steam-powered [sic] rocket high enough above the Mojave Desert to demonstrate the point [see FT368:10]. The rocket failed. Like other flat-Earthers, Hughes seems convinced a conspiracy of Freemasons and the Illuminati, aided and abetted by NASA (and presumably by Chinese, European, Indian, Israeli and other space agencies) is keeping the truth from the world, although exactly why is never quite clear. One can go down a large and labyrinthine rabbit hole in pursuing this stuff, so we thought we’d bring you the concise version of flat-Eartherism, first published by its author William Carpenter in 1885, and updated in 2017 to include various web links to keep you abreast of current thinking. This is contrarian thinking at its finest. [See also FT328:20-21.]
We’re not about to embark on a comprehensive debunk of One Hundred Proofs that the Earth is not a Globe, partly because that would be tedious (and overlong), and partly because a fair few of the 100 ‘proofs’ amount to repetitions of others. But we can address those that have struck us most from among the throng of egregious eccentricities...
Carpenter starts with an introduction mostly concerned, or consumed, with exercising great sarcasms against the globalist arguments of astronomer Richard A Proctor (1837–88), who is clearly his bête noire. This ultimately causes Carpenter to fall on his face even before he’s launched into his 100 ‘proofs’. “Why,” he exclaims, “if it were possible to show the two ends of a fourmile stretch of water to be on a level, with the center portion of that water bulged up, the surface of the Earth would be a series of four-mile curves!” This is partly, um, circular reasoning, seeming to take the flat Earth as a given, but nutty nonetheless. Proctor was using the familiar demonstration of the ship ‘sinking’ below the horizon as a proof of Earth’s globularity. The horizon, on a plain like the mighty Serengeti or in the open sea, is about three miles distant to a 6ft- [1.8m] tall human; add a bit of range if the observer’s on a deck of a boat or top of a bus – 12ft (3.7m) up and the horizon is 4.7 miles (7.6km) distant. Now float on angel’s wings above the observer and draw a circle of three miles radius around him: it will have an area of about 28 square miles (73km2). Now think of that circle as the area lit by a spotlight of great power, held aloft by more angels, or aliens, or fairies, if you’d prefer. As the observer moves, so does that pool of light, and the visible horizon retreats accordingly. The distant ship doesn’t go up a hill of water and down the other side, it continues on one curve, that of the globe. And if you do the arithmetic, you’ll discover that that 28 square miles is about seven millionths of the area of the Earth, with a curvature so gentle that for the purposes of map- and chart-making it can be represented as flat, down to quite small scales before becoming practically misleading.
The point about the curve of the globe being gentle enough to be treated for all practical purposes as flat at large scales and, indeed, on the ground, deals in short order with Carpenter’s third ‘proof’: “Surveyors’ operations in the construction of railroads, tunnels, or canals are conducted without the slightest ‘allowances’ being made for ‘curvature’, although it is taught that this so-called allowance is absolutely necessary! This is a cutting proof that the Earth is not a globe.” Was the pun intended, we wonder. That allowance is made automatically through the employment of the humble spirit level and more exalted theodolite and, we have noticed, lengths of string. If it were possible (or even useful) to build a wall or dig a trench of precisely the same height or depth throughout, all along a single line of Earth’s latitude, the spirit level at any point would show a ‘flat’ surface. Actually it’s better described as level. A railroad built with a flat or straight bed would soon find itself going off at a tangent into space instead of to Chattanooga, Charing Cross, or wherever.
A nice illustration of the difference came from Dr Stirling Colgate (1925–2013), who in 1954 was put in charge of the “fast” diagnostics (neutrons and gamma rays) for the Bravo H-bomb test, on Bikini Atoll. In a memoir (www.nmt.edu/news/all-news/5162013/4971-meet-dr-stirling-colgate-iconictech-president), it’s recalled that “There was one particularly amusing part of this bomb test experiment involving a dozen twomile-long vacuum pipe lines necessary to accurately view the device from far enough away to save the recording equipment from
the expected blast. ‘When six of us young physicists arrived in Bikini several months before the test, but after an immense effort by thousands working for the contractor... we found that the gamma rays from a radioactive test source wouldn’t pass through the vacuum pipelines for a distance of two miles.’”
Oh dear. And why not? Because the contractors had built the pipes level with the ground. At the end furthest from the test site, following the curve of the Earth, they were 32in (81cm) lower than they should have been. Once the scientists had had them straightened out, all went well.
But as Colgate said at the time:
“Oh my God, they forgot that the Earth is round!”
There are many places in this book (well, about 100) where Carpenter and reality are strangely detached from each other. Other ‘proofs’ are either so convoluted or so aggressively stated as to amount to no proof of anything except militant assertion; these we pass over in silence. Here comes a selection of the most outstanding that lay claim to reasoning.
You could choose any line of latitude to argue about, but Carpenter selects 45˚ as suitable – that is, halfway between the poles and the equator. He maintains (see Proofs 63, 78) that ships circumnavigating the globe along the southern latitude take vastly longer than travellers along the same northern latitude. As indeed they would, were the Earth to be flat. This is difficult to digest, as a glance at a world map will show that only an amphibious vessel could manage the northern journey. Carpenter cites the southern circumnavigation of HMS Challenger, which covered “indirectly, to be sure” nearly 69,000 nautical miles in her threeyear voyage (1872–76). Challenger didn’t follow the 45th parallel, and if she had she would still have added a bit to the calculated (global) distance in order to dodge South America and the Antipodes; and the length of the overall journey would include sailing south to the 45th, and back north to England. But “indirectly, to be sure” indeed describes her voyage, as that actually involved sailing south down the Alantic, heading east to circumnavigate Australia, then north into the Pacific, then south and around Cape Horn before cruising north past West Africa and crossing the Atlantic to have a snoop around Newfoundland and then south again to nose around the West Indies before heading back to England. Not bad for a paddle-assisted sailing ship, and not exactly your direct trip along a southern parallel, either. (A similar fast one is pulled by other Flat Earthers, who cite the circumnavigations of Capt. James Cook, whose voyages – especially his second – were equally, if not more, tortuous.)
One of Carpenter’s other curious claims is that the world is cooler south of the equator. Tell that to the Australians, or whoever, if anyone, lives in the Atacama Desert.
We have a fine example of Carpenter making the wrong assumptions in his treatment of the compass needle, which, we all know, points north. Carpenter, taking the flat Earth for granted, insists (Proof 11) that t’other end of the needle therefore points in all directions south, and this a proof that the Earth is not a globe. Sure, if your reasoning is circular. But on a globular Earth, the other end of the needle must point (roughly) to the South Pole. Carpenter’s wonky logic excels itself in Proof 13: “As the mariner’s compass points north and south at the same time, and a meridian is a north and south line, it follows that meridians can be no other than straight lines. But since all meridians on a globe are semicircles, it is an incontrovertible proof that the Earth is not a globe.” Well, not quite. A meridian – a line of latitude – is straight as a die, viewed from directly above as a
William Carpenter pictured in the Buffalo Evening News in 1885.
line from pole to pole. It’s only ‘semicircular’ when viewed from an angle. So Mr Carpenter’s proof is not so incontrovertible after all.
Then we have his various objections to globularity, which, in so many words, suggest that people in the southern hemisphere would fall into space. He never mentions the word ‘gravity’, but it’s clear he rejects the very idea of it (Proofs 21, 86, 87). That people, cats, chess tables or trains don’t drop away into infinitudes is a proof that the Earth is flat, and furthermore is motionless in space. Why people don’t just get blown off into space in mighty storms, he doesn’t explain. On a related point (Proof 85), he assures us that rivers don’t flow uphill (true, indeed), so rivers flowing southto-north are possible only on a flat Earth, since on a globe they would have to be flowing upward. But on a globe – or anywhere – rivers flow downhill just the same, from high points to low, in any direction. Gravity, that Newtonian unmentionable, has somewhat to do with this, as well as the strange truth that in space there isn’t really an ‘up’, ‘down’ or even a sideways: if the south magnetic pole were stronger than the north, cartographers might well have drawn their maps the other way up.
Some of Carpenter’s proofs are flat-out lies: see No 71, in which he claims that the North Star has been seen 20˚ south of the equator. No it hasn’t. It isn’t visible below the equator at all, to which we can attest from personal experience. And some are just plain weird, as in No 93: “We have seen that astronomers – to give us a level surface on which to live – have cut off one half of the ‘globe’ in a certain picture in their books. Now... one half of the substance of their ‘spherical theory’ is given up!... Nothing remains, then, but a plane Earth, which is, of course, a proof that the Earth is not a globe.” By the same logic, an anatomical drawing of a human leg – just the one – would imply that humans hop about, and do not actually walk on two feet.
From various comments (see Proof 17, and the introduction, and other Proofs passim) it becomes clear that Carpenter’s real gripe is with ‘science’, which he sees as defying the Word of God. To that extent flat-Eartherism is of a piece with the great 19th-century protest against Darwin, which created a false dichotomy and factitious hostilities between science and religion. Carpenter’s book is a monument to being on the wrong side of both.
“IF A BOOK ABOUT FAILURES DOESN‘T SELL, IS IT A SUCCESS?” Jerry Seinfield