Sounding like the Borg of Hampden, he declared that spherical earth theories had to go: 'All further resistance is useless.'Īnd he was willing to wager his money on it. He made it his mission to eradicate such ideas from the public consciousness, even when his bombastic techniques horrified his flat-earth grandfather Parallax. Like our modern creationists, John Hampden looked on in horror as the masses slurped up all the science they could hold, including the round-earth heresy. This was the era of steam-powered printing presses and vastly expanding public interest in science, fed by vigorous journalism - a veritable Information Age rather like our own.

Putting his tract-making skills to work, he quickly produced pamphlets such as The Popularity of Error and the Unpopularity of Truth: Shewing the World to be a Stationary Plane and Not a Revolving Globe, purporting to prove the pancake-osity of the planet. Upon reading Theoretical Astronomy, he became convinced the earth was flat, and he had the Bible verses to prove it. After dropping out of Oxford, he occupied himself by publishing various tracts demanding that the Church of England be reformed 'on strict Protestant lines.' A staunch biblical literalist 'bent on defending Genesis to the hilt,' he was ripe pickings for Carpenter's flat-earth crusade. John Hampden wasted little time doing just that. His father had left him independently wealthy, although, perhaps suspecting his eldest son would prove prone to causing controversy, stipulated in his will that John would be reduced to a meager £50 per year if he ever did anything to sully the venerable name of Hampden. John Hampden, a Protestant rector's son and all-round arch-conservative, had plenty of leisure time for engaging in argument. This book soon came to the attention of the man who was to vex Alfred Russel Wallace so sorely. Determined to rid the world of round-earth ideas, he wrote a scathing book called Theoretical Astronomy Examined and Exposed under the (mis)nom(er) de plume Common Sense. One of his many popular lectures on the subject converted William Carpenter, who loved the idea more for its poke in the eye it gave to the scientific establishment than for reasons of biblical fealty. He revived the ancient flat-earth idea and gave it a modern patina of 'science,' then used the result to stir up controversy for cash. He backed his contentions with bad math, bogus experiments, and Bible verses. The North Pole stood at its center, and that was it in his cosmology, there was no such beast as a South Pole. Known as Parallax, he was a Biblical literalist, young earth creationist, and quack who believed in a flat, disc-shaped Earth. Not many of them went to greater extremes than Samuel Birley Rowbotham. Alarmed believers strove to shore up the Bible's authority, some going much further than others. They may have steered a much different course had they known the history of the men they hoped to defeat.ġ9 th century Britain was one of the epicenters of the scientific revolution. Sir Charles Lyell, father of modern geology, shared Wallace's ignorance. It constitutes, therefore, the most regrettable incident in my life.

And it was all brought upon me by my own ignorance and my own fault-ignorance of the fact so well shown by the late Professor de Morgan-that 'paradoxers,' as he termed them, can never be convinced, and my fault in wishing to get money by any kind of wager.

The next matter was a much more serious one, and cost me fifteen years of continued worry, litigation, and persecution, with the final loss of several hundred pounds. Alas, nothing is easy when it comes to creationists, as Wallace would learn to his sorrow: Really, ten minutes and a telescope should have done it. Why was such a venerable 19 th century man of science accepting wagers from flat-earthers regarding the shape of our planet? The father of biogeography, co-discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection, seems an unlikely sort to be mixed in with religious fanatics on a question of geography settled since the 3 rd century BC. In January of 1870, Alfred Russel Wallace found himself on a collision-course with a group of creationists who fervently believed the earth is flat.

Alfred russel wallace