FLAT EARTH: The History of an Infamous Idea Christopher Hart on Christine Garwood’s book, in the
Sunday Times: April 22, 2007
Recent flat-earthism was revived by an awkward Lancashireman (if that’s not a tautology), one Samuel Birley Rowbotham of Stockport, a radical socialist, quack doctor and all-round pain in the neck. With scant education concealed by tremendous energy and self-belief, Rowbotham started touring England in the late 1830s, arguing that the earth was a flat disc, the sun was 400 miles from London, and that we age only because we ingest too much “phosphate and sulphate of lime”. He comes across as a Victorian hybrid of David Icke and Dave Spart. Garwood vividly evokes this milieu of bolshy, furiously autodidactic working-class men in their splendid Mechanics’ Institutes and Owenite Halls of Science, determined to prove those toffee-nosed boffins down in London wrong. Even if they were spectacularly wrong themselves, there’s something appealing about their stubborn contrariness, as with global-warming sceptics today. Unquestioning herd-like consensus is never a healthy state of affairs.
The tone of their scientific debates was also vigorous. They dismissed each other’s arguments as “loquacious twaddle and milk-and-water moonshine”, and their opponents as “brainless boobies, infidel upstarts, swaggering freethinkers, knavish professors and the scum of the literary world”. It all makes contemporary scientific debates seem a little anaemic, except perhaps those featuring Richard Dawkins. (There is no God, and Dawkins is his Prophet.)
More at:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/history/article1672192.ece*
globularists - a word recently used by our own Tom Bishop. Has he read an advance copy? Has the entire FES sold out?