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Christine Garwood

Forfatter af Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea

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Om forfatteren

Christine Garwood is an author and researcher specializing in nineteenth century social history and the history of science. She has published on topics as diverse as Victorian environmentalism, quack medicines, popular astronomy and the history of ideas.

Værker af Christine Garwood

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Fødselsdato
20th century
Køn
female
Nationalitet
UK
Uddannelse
University of Leicester

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Just before Christmas, this popped through the door completely anonymously. Tearing it open, it sounded like just the thing to while away a day or so reading over the break. I finished it on the second day.

Do not take my quick read as any evidence for how well written this novel is. In fact, I finished it despite Christine Garwood’s best effort to document the history of the modern flat earth movement from the early 19th century to somewhere around 2007.

This span of time is one of the book’s many weaknesses. Garwood unfortunately ends when flat earth theories were just getting warmed up on the Interwebs. Any book with “Flat Earth” in the title and Mark Sargent and his companions missing from the content just isn’t doing the subject any justice… at least as far as humour goes.

However, the main issue with Flat Earth is that although Garwood rightly considers that modern belief in a flat earth “raises issues central to … the uses and abuses of information” (p. 35) she then fails to actually give this any real consideration. This is a mighty failure.

The fact that people believe that the earth is flat in the 21st century is really of no consequence to any of us who don’t. It’s in no way a threat. But what is potentially threatening to all of us is how people come to believe in a flat earth and maintain those beliefs. That Garwood does not deal with this issue more substantially than in a 12-page epilogue is a serious shortcoming.

Instead, the book rambles through the usual suspects beginning with a long section on Rowbotham through mandatory coverage of the Bedford Levels controversy leading inevitably to Lady Blount. It then makes a brief foray over the Atlantic to spend a moment on Voliva before settling back in the UK for the dawn of the space age.

At this point, just when I thought it was going to get interesting, Garwood starts to let unfettered access to the correspondence of Samuel Shenton cloud her judgement. Maybe to justify some fee she had to pay for access, she feels the need to detail individual correspondence that is at best banal and at worst repetitively banal.

Sadly, this continues when she shifts the focus back to North America where correspondence of Leo Ferrari and finally Charles Johnson bludgeon your interest to death. By the end of the book, you’ve stopped caring. Here’s a sample:

"During 1973 further positive developments were to transpire. Nowlan had finally finished his first novel, Various Persons Named Kevin O’Brien, and disappeared on a working holiday to Campobello Island to continue the research for his official history. Leo, meanwhile, went camping in California where he hoped to further his medieval studeies and promote the society’s work. More promising still, he was not alone on the trip. Earlier that year he had met a new girlfriend, and together that summer they clocked up approximately 12,000 miles in Ferrari’s 1966 Chevelle. While Ferrari was enjoying ‘wine, sunshine and the best of company’ in California, he joked on a postcard to Nowlan that he was … "(continues for 94 pages)p. 303

That the book was in need of a better editor is made more evident by an appendix that contains a list of “Scriptural ‘Proofs'” for a flat earth cosmology from the Old Testament. Quite why Garwood felt this was necessary is not obvious. The Bible and the influence of those who interpret it literally is mentioned fairly consistently, but not enough is made of how it is an inability to correctly apply hermeneutics (to all texts, not just biblical ones) that is really at issue here.

The most apt quote of all is the only one I will assuredly take from my reading of this work. in the 19th century, Charles Kettle was responding to correspondence with a flat earth believer who said that as no one had seen the earth as a globe, how could anyone say it existed. Exasperated by the bad logic that often accompanies debates on the topic, he replied

You have not seen your own brains. Do you believe you have any?
p. 92

Having read Flat Earth, I was just waiting to complete this review before sending it on to a close relative of mine who believes the earth is flat. However, just yesterday, I received an email from her admitting to being my benefactor. I was somewhat surprised at this seeing as Garwood clearly is of the opinion that belief in a flat earth is an “apparent absurdity” (p. 35). I’m going to have to find someone else to pass it on to then!

For more reviews and the 1001 Books Spreadsheet, visit http://arukiyomi.com
… (mere)
½
 
Markeret
arukiyomi | 5 andre anmeldelser | Jan 31, 2021 |
Meticulously researched and pretty enjoyable, Christine Garwood’s Flat Earth chronicles modern (meaning post 18th-century Western, the recent spate of Facebook woowoos isn’t included) eccentrics who believed – or at least professed they believed – that the Earth is flat.


Garwood first discounts the popular myth that the “Dark Ages” church taught the world was flat (although she notes that a couple of early Christian writers did claim that, denouncing the globular Earth as a “pagan Greek superstition”), and that Columbus proved the Earth was round. She then jumps to Victorian times and launches a series of biographies of the antiglobularists, starting with Samuel Birley Rowbotham, who used the pen name “Parallax”.


Rowbotham/Parallax is a puzzling character; he was apparently a brilliant lecturer. Garwood can’t figure out if he was sincere or not (neither can I), and speculates that he was only interested in the money he made from his talks. Possibly to his own consternation, he spun off a number of contemporaries who very definitely did believe in a flat Earth – William Carpenter, a printer, who used his printing business to crank out numerous flat Earth tracts; and John Hampden, a middle-class Englishman from a clerical family who would actually cause Parallax considerable trouble.


Parallax claimed he had experimental proofs that the Earth was flat, based on observations made along the Old Bedford Canal. He did consent, once, to a public experiment, involving the Eddystone Lighthouse. The conditions were that the lighthouse would be observed (by telescope) from the top of a seashore cliff, where both parties expected the entire structure to be visible; then again from the beach, where Parallax said the entire structure would still be visible and the astronomers said just the lantern would be seen. As it happened, only half the lantern could be seen from the beach – an error in atmospheric index of refraction – and Parallax claimed victory, on the grounds that the astronomers’ prediction was wrong. He seems to have been such a convincing lecturer that a good part of the assembled crowd believed him.


The next chapter is the least satisfying in the book. John Hampden was a loose cannon to Parallax’s polished delivery. While Parallax may or may not have actually believed what he was talking about, Hampden most definitely did. He wrote threatening letters to editors, called the Astronomer Royal insulting names, and, despite subtle cautions from Parallax, wagered £500 that the Earth was flat. Alfred Russell Wallace, the “other” evolutionary theorist, took up the challenge.


Garwood considers Wallace ill-advised. Wallace was short of money and doubtless felt that the £500 would be easy money. However, Wallace had also succumbed to Spiritualism (after seeing a stout medium levitate to the ceiling) and was thus viewed with some suspicion by the rest of the scientific community. Wallace was also a quintessential Victorian gentleman and doubtless believed Hampden was likewise. The wager condition was that the two parties would meet, with impartial referees, at the Old Bedford Canal, place targets a suitable distances, and observe the expected results – Hampden expecting the targets to be in a straight line and Wallace expecting them to show curvature. This is where things get a little strange, and I’m not sure if the error is Wallace’s or Garwood’s for not explaining things well enough.


According to Garwood, Wallace expected the middle marker – a black disk on a pole set at a specified distance above the canal surface – to be above the line of sight when the telescope was placed on one bridge and then focused on another, 6 miles away. However, when the time came to do the experiment, Wallace leveled the telescope after focusing on the distant bridge. This, left the middle marker below the line of sight and the distant bridge even further below it. Apparently the referees didn’t understand this and thus initially concluded that the water was flat. Garwood attributes the action of the referees to some confusion over the purpose of the crosshairs in the telescope; a simple diagram here would have been worth paragraphs.


Eventually, of course, the referees came around and Wallace collected the wager. It probably wasn’t worth it; Hampden went berserk, accused Wallace of bribing the referees, and sent him repeated threatening letters for the rest of their lives (despite losing lawsuits and being jailed at least once). The scientific community was generally unsupportive of Wallace, both due to his spiritualist leanings and the lack of wisdom in debating with a flat-earther in the first place.


The next flat earth advocate was Lady Elizabeth Blount, who was also a poet and novelist. I’d really like to get a copy of her novel, Adrian Galilio, a romance about a Lady Alma, married to a baronet (Lady Blount was married to a baronet) who misunderstands her and derides her convictions (Sir Walter Blount left no recorded comments on his understanding of his wife and her convictions; he was nineteen years older than she was when they married and although it would be uncharitable to assume his attraction was based on something other than her convictions, I will anyway). Lady Alma eventually finds solace with a Catholic priest (!) and then travels around Europe as a flat earth crusader using the nom de guerre Madame Bianka. Lady Blount also published the Earth Not A Globe Review, and embarked on a scheme to provide dental work to the poor, which later got her into financial trouble.


The next flat earth center of the world was Zion, Illinois, a Utopian religious community founded by evangelist John Dowie but later usurped by his assistant Wilbur Glenn Voliva after Dowie announced he was the reincarnation of Elijah and (apparently; might be false accusations by Voliva) claiming he was entitled to plural wives. I’ve actually been to Zion; there’s a spectacular set of sand dunes and a beach on Lake Michigan that you can only get to through Zion, and driving through the down was a puzzling experience for me – I was perhaps 9 or 10. There were ladies wearing long dresses and signs prohibiting a variety of activities, including eating ice cream on the Sabbath. (There’s a rumor that Zion also prohibited flatulence on the Sabbath, but I’ve never been able to confirm or refute that). At any rate, Voliva was no longer around when I visited. His approach to the flat earth was more like Hampden, and he was famous for virulent radio speeches and erecting enormous propaganda billboards. Garwood notes that Zion had a police force of around 800 for a town of 2000 inhabitants during Voliva’s tenure, which I suspect means that some of the laws were actually enforced.


The book continues with Samuel Shenton, and Englishman whose flat earth beliefs came around when one of his inventions was dismissed – he proposed a sort of zeppelin-helicopter that would rise into the sky, sit “stationary” while the earth rotated beneath it, then come down a few hours later thousands of miles away. When his proposal was dismissed without hearing by various universities and government agencies, he decided it was because they had “something to hide” – i.e., that the earth was flat. Shenton became a popular figure for newspaper and television interviews about the space program, and not only believed that the moon landings, but the entire space program, were fake.


Garwood then has another unfortunate chapter in an already long book – the Canadian Flat Earth Society. Although clearly intended as a joke, Garwood devotes a lot of detail to biographies of the founders (professors at St. Thomas’s University in New Brunswick) including their drinking habits and marital difficulties. Could have easily been left out or reduced to a paragraph or so.


The final flat-earther is Charles Johnson, a self-educated Californian who took over Shenton’s records and also corresponded with Voliva. Johnson and Shenton had a lot in common – although the primary reason for their beliefs was religion, they were not simply Bible-thumpers like Voliva. Johnson, in particular, was all over the map. While you might expect a flat earth advocate to be a political conservative, Johnson was convinced that Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and “Uncle Joe” Stalin were all secret flat-earthers, and that the United Nations flag was a symbol of that organization’s flat earth beliefs. Johnson also became popular for interviews about the space program, and some of his publications are available on the Internet.


Garwood concludes with some observations about beliefs, using frequently cited poll results on the number of Americans that believe in the literal truth of the Bible and moon landing fakery (I’ve never heard that moon-landing deniers were particularly religious, but I admit I don’t follow it very much).


As mentioned, this is a fascinating book and well worth reading, but may be a little too much personality oriented. Although all flat-earthers were religious fundamentalists (with the exception of the Canadians) I would have liked to see a little more coherent religious justification. An appendix mentions Parallax’s verse citations, based on the Earth resting “upon the waters” and Heaven being “up”. Volvia cited the mention of the “corners” of the Earth, although like most flat-earthers he thought it was a disk. Garwood doesn’t go into any details on any evidence for the earth being spherical; in particular, a little discussion of Occam’s Razor would have been prudent. Most flat-earthers wanted a disk-shaped Earth, with an ice barrier at the South “Pole”, and a Sun, Moon and stars that moved around some distance above with the apparent rising and setting explained as sort of a flashlight effect. It would have been well to note that you can actually devise optical and gravitational laws that make this work (no, I’m not going to), just like you can make geocentric astronomy work, and the “proof” of a spherical earth is that it’s so much simpler that way.
… (mere)
½
 
Markeret
setnahkt | 5 andre anmeldelser | Dec 8, 2017 |
I saw this book in a remainders bin and grabbed it, looking forward to a humorous review of eccentrics and their belief in a flat earth. This book didn't really live up to the self-induced hype, however.

There were certainly some amusing moments ut Garwood provides too much detail at times, getting bogged down in describing every pamphlet and every public talk given by leading Zetetics. In particular, the Canadians who were decidedly not flat earthers did not deserve their own chapter and, the pages spent detailing occasions they got drunk together felt like desperate padding.… (mere)
½
 
Markeret
MiaCulpa | 5 andre anmeldelser | Jan 1, 2014 |
Yep, there are people out there that believe the Earth is flat. OK, there aren't many of them, but they're there all right. After all, can *you* prove that the Earth is round? Moon landings? Fake. Google Earth? Please - fake. Anybody who's been in West Texas knows just how flat the Earth really is!

In spite of what some of us learned in school, Columbus didn't disprove the notion that the Earth is flat. In fact, most educated people since the ancient Greeks have understood that Earth is round. The mid-19th century, though, did bring changes to how we do science and our understanding of the world - how it was made, where it fits in the universe. And along with those changes came reactionaries. Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea is Christine Garwood's history of those who didn't believe the Earth was round in spite of the ample evidence of modern astronomy.

Some of these Flat Earthers (planoterrestrials!) were taking advantage of conflict between science and Christianity to make a name for themselves. Some used the Flat Earth Society as a way to get people to think for themselves and not rely on authority. Most, though, truly believed that the Earth is flat. Garwood mostly succeeds in getting the reader into the mindset of the leaders in Flat Earth thinking from about 1870 to the final fading away of the Flat Earth Society in America in 2001.

This is the kind of book I like - lots of interesting characters and plenty of discussion of how Flat Earth ideas fit into the context of the times. Garwood seems to like her subjects and while she doesn't agree with them, she doesn't trivialize them either. The main fault with the book is that the discussion is somewhat repetitive; Garwood tends to repeat herself when drawing conclusions. It's not enough to spoil the book, but some tightening would have been welcome.
… (mere)
5 stem
Markeret
drneutron | 5 andre anmeldelser | May 3, 2010 |

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200
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#110,008
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½ 3.5
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ISBN
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