I have been in a large room filled with people in colorful costumes and wearing odd bits of plastic upon their face.  I have sat with them and listened to them talk disconsolately about a proposed re-write of a fictional universe that would alter the “history” as previously composed.  I sympathized until my pupils contracted to mere dots.  I write this by way of saying that I have seen the reeking armpit of obsession.

Enter one Samuel Birley Rowbotham, who went by the name “Parallax” for obvious reasons.  He is the progenitor, not the obsessive in the story.  Parallax toured the U.K. teaching “zetetic astronomy,” which argued that the Earth is flat with the North Pole at its center.  Next, we meet John Hampden, who read Rowbotham’s Earth Not A Globe and, you guessed it, became obsessed when it turned on so many light bulbs in his head that ships could navigate by his nose.  Hampden offered £500 to anyone who could prove that the Earth was round.  Alfred Russel Wallace, scientist and all around swell guy, won the bet easily on March 5, 1870.

1870?  Obsession breeds obsession.  Hampden found like-minded loons and started a movement based on the premise that libeling Wallace was better than scientific proof.  Good hullabaloo moves easily across the ocean.  Locally, Buffalo resident Alexander Gleason published Is the Earth a Globe? (1893) in which he demonstrated that Lake Eerie showed no sign of convexity.

The modern flat earth movement blossomed again in England with Samuel Shanton, who founded the International Flat Earth Society.  The presidency passed to American Charles Johnson on Shanton’s death in 1971.  Whether anyone agreed with him or not, Johnson was known for his reliance on fact in defending the Society’s agenda.  He died in 2001, leaving the flat earth ship without a rudder, adrift along the treacherous edge of the planet’s border.  Be wary of Flat Earth Society impostors on the Internet.  As you might imagine, the topic lends itself to satire.

December, 2006