When Kelly Weill begins her capsule history of the modern flat-earth movement in the opening chapters of her recent book Off the Edge (Weill 2022; reviewed in Branch 2022), she credits Samuel Birley Rowbotham (1816–1884), who wrote under the pseudonym “Parallax,” as its prime mover. In doing so, she agrees with the general scholarly consensus: for example, Christine Garwood’s definitive history Flat Earth credits Rowbotham as responsible for the “modern public revival of the flat-earth idea” (Garwood 2007, 36). But following the late Robert J. Schadewald, Weill also hints at a precursor: “an anonymous author had self-published a short booklet called The Anti-Newtonian in 1819 … its specific arguments are so similar to Rowbotham’s that he really appears to have taken large parts for his own purposes” (Weill 2022, 18–19, citing Schadewald 2015, ch. 1). Who was the anonymous author of the booklet? Were its arguments similar to Rowbotham’s? And did it indeed influence him?

The Flat Earth according to The Anti-Newtonian

According to The Anti-Newtonian, as Schadewald reports, “the earth is a vast circular plain enclosed by a wall of ice. A map [or, rather, a schematic diagram—see accompanying figure] in the pamphlet shows the north pole at the center, the south pole at 12 o’clock, east and west respectively at 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock, and an ‘unknown pole’ at 6 o’clock” (Schadewald 2015, ch. 1).¹ The booklet’s arguments are turgidly presented and hard to understand. Considering the objection that the mast of a nearing ship is visible before the hull, which suggests that the earth is round, the author offers a single 361-word sentence that wrongly assumes the relevance of telescopes and gratuitously invokes scripture before winding to its end.

The scientific details aside, The Anti-Newtonian exhibits three characteristics prevalent throughout the flat-earth movement in general. First, it affirms the priority of do-it-yourself observation and experiment, repeatedly appealing to common experience to support its claims. Second, and correlatively, it deprecates theory—especially the physics of Isaac Newton, as the title suggests—as speculative, conjectural, and even absurd. (These attitudes easily deepen into conspiracy thinking, as with later flat-earthers.) Third, it insists that the Bible is inerrant in all it teaches, which includes a flat earth. “I have … pointed out the true system of the universe, according to the word of God, who created all things,” the author declares in the booklet’s first sentence; later, the episode in Matthew 4, in which the devil takes Jesus to a very high mountain and tries to tempt him by displaying all the kingdoms of the world, is specifically adduced as evidence against the sphericality of the earth.

The Anti-Newtonian and the Board of Longitude

The ornate subtitle of The Anti-Newtonian advertises a “Map of Explanation, proving the Sun to be a moveable body … from which the Longitude is to be found, by Dial Shadow, without the least Variation.” The booklet thus promises a solution to the longitude problem, which suggests that the author might have not only paid to have the booklet published but also communicated with the Board of Longitude, established by the British government in 1714, which famously offered a prize for a workable way of establishing longitude at sea (Sobel 1995). As it happens, the board’s papers are available in digital form from the University of Cambridge Digital Library. There, in a “Correspondence regarding impracticable schemes for establishing longitude” folder, are a series of letters about “a method of finding the Longitude supposing ‘the Sun to be the moveable body.’” (The phrase “the Sun to be the moveable body” is especially distinctive.) These letters are signed by a man named James Fosbury.

Fosbury first wrote to the board on April 27, 1819, enclosing a passage about the longitude from a yet-to-be-published booklet; he sent a further passage about magnets on May 6, 1819, and then “my little publication” (not, interestingly, The Anti-Newtonian) a few days later. After he received what was presumably a form letter in reply, he gushed, on November 23, 1819, about “having received your polite and so far satisfactory answer” (Fosbury 1819b). His satisfaction with his reception by the board was not to last. After he resumed correspondence with the board in March 1821, sending a “correction” to his previous work, he soon soured. On March 23, 1821, he warned the board that if he didn’t receive a “confutation” of his solution, “I shall transmit it unto every other maritime Power.” Nevertheless, on May 10, 1823, he requested the consideration of “one of the accompanying Pamphlets” by the board. Then the correspondence (Fosbury 1819b; Fosbury 1819–1823) ends.

Fosbury’s Works

So who was James Fosbury? From the address he gave in his correspondence with the board—94 New Bond Street, London—he appears to have been the proprietor of the Blenheim Coffeehouse and Hotel from about 1813 to about 1828. No further information about his life is available, but the Foyle Special Collections Library of King’s College London includes a volume containing four booklets bound together as “Fosbury’s Works.” These, to give short versions of their prolix titles, are The Anti-Newtonian (the same booklet discovered by Schadewald), The Righteousness of God Defended (1817), Reflections on the Inconsistency of Speculative Astronomy (1819), and Familiar Conversations on the Real Causes of England’s Distresses (1818). Presumably the original owner of the booklets purchased them separately, had them bound together, and chose the title—although Familiar Conversations, which addresses topics in economics rather than astronomy, is usually attributed to Henry Hull.

Even without inspecting their texts in detail, however, it is evident that the remaining three booklets are by Fosbury. The passages from his forthcoming booklet that Fosbury sent to the board about longitude and magnets are verbatim transcriptions of passages from Reflections on the Inconsistency of Speculative Astronomy (Fosbury 1819c, 58–66, 23–29). Moreover, the author of The Anti-Newtonian uses the term speculative astronomy twice (Fosbury 1819a, ii and 16) to describe the topic of a former publication of his, which might have been either Reflections on the Inconsistency of Speculative Astronomy or the earlier The Righteousness of God Defended, the full title of which similarly promises “reflections on the inconsistencies of speculative astronomy.” A detailed comparison of the topics, arguments, and styles of the three booklets would be extraordinarily tedious to compile but would amply confirm their shared authorship.

The Question of Influence and the Wall of Ice

Schadewald (2015, ch. 1) writes, “Rowbotham never mentions The Anti-Newtonian in any of his writings, but he almost certainly based his own system on it.” While the first part of his claim seems to be correct (and Rowbotham appears not to mention either of Fosbury’s other booklets either), the second part is open to question. Without developing a complicated methodology to compare Rowbotham’s and Fosbury’s flat-earth models, it is plausible to regard similarities as evidence for, and dissimilarities as evidence against, the claim that Fosbury influenced Rowbotham—unless those similarities or dissimilarities are independently explainable. Schadewald in effect agrees, because, for example, he acknowledges that Rowbotham’s model “discarded” aspects of Fosbury’s model (which involved the unknown direction and a corresponding unknown pole) on the grounds that they were, and Rowbotham must have realized it, unworkable.

The problem for the claim that Fosbury influenced Rowbotham, then, is that the bulk of the similarities between the two flat-earth models are explainable in terms of a common source: the Bible. Schadewald himself observed that “flat-earthism in the English-speaking world is and always has been entirely based upon the Bible” (Schadewald 2015, appendix A), and the passages of the Bible that lend themselves to a flat-earth reading would have been equally available to Rowbotham and Fosbury. The exception is the wall of ice at the rim of the flat earth, for which there is no biblical warrant. But a different common source presents itself: the fact that the early explorers of the Southern Ocean—such as the British national hero Captain James Cook, who circumnavigated Antarctica within the Antarctic Circle in 1773—reported encountering massive amounts of ice in high southern latitudes. A natural conjecture would be that the southernmost reaches of the earth—the rim, if the earth is flat—is dominated by ice.

Fosbury the Obscure

A further obstacle to the idea that Fosbury influenced Rowbotham is his obscurity. On the available evidence, Fosbury was actively espousing the flat-earth theory in London only between 1817 and 1823, while Rowbotham, born in 1816, was a child living outside Manchester, 200 miles to the northwest. In the days before the internet or even interlibrary loan, it is hard to imagine how obscure works such as Fosbury’s, privately printed and presumably out of print by the time that Rowbotham learned to read, would have come to his attention in the first place. True, Rowbotham claims to have enjoyed access to “a small scientific library, a large and expensive orrery, and several telescopes” (Schadewald 2015, ch. 1) while residing with his paternal grandfather as a youth, so it is conceivable that the library contained a copy of one of Fosbury’s booklets. But in the absence of any direct evidence that Fosbury’s work was available to Rowbotham, the possibility is at best remote.

Moreover, unlike Rowbotham, Fosbury tended to hide his flat-earthery under a bushel. Of his booklets, only The Anti-Newtonian declares on its title page that it argues for “the impossibility of a globular world,” a phrase that appears only in the final clause of the prolix title. Indeed, Fosbury often leans toward agnosticism about the shape of the earth, contending, “And that it is round is beyond a doubt, … but of what other shape or form, it has not as yet ever been in the power of man to discover or describe: for of all the assertions and proofs that have been given, by modern geographers and astronomers, of the Earth’s being either of a globular or spherical form, there is not the least certainty to warrant mankind in fact to believe that it really is so” (Fosbury 1819a, 8–9; a parallel passage appears in Fosbury 1817, 24). Only a diligent reader would realize, amid the multitude of topics Fosbury addressed in his obscure style, that he thought that the earth was flat.

***

The anonymous author of The Anti-Newtonian, now known to be James Fosbury, was apparently a sincere believer in the flat earth a generation before Rowbotham took up the cudgels, although unlike Rowbotham he was not particularly invested in promoting the idea. Consequently, Fosbury’s influence was probably limited to the readers of his privately published booklets and the unsympathetic staff at the Board of Longitude. There is no convincing evidence that he influenced Rowbotham. Presented obscurely and briefly, Fosbury’s specific arguments are not nearly as detailed as Rowbotham’s, whose Zetetic Astronomy ran 430 pages in its third edition from 1881. The similarities between their works are readily explainable in terms of their reliance on common sources, especially the Bible. So, while Fosbury was a genuine precursor of Rowbotham, he is best regarded as a historical cul-de-sac rather than as a figure responsible for a campaign of flat-earth folly that persists even today.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Adam Ray, special collections manager at the Foyle Special Collections Library of King’s College London, who provided a digital copy of The Righteousness of God Defended.

References

Branch, Glenn. 2022. On the ball [review of Weill 2022]. Skeptical Inquirer 46(4) (July/August): 59–60.

Fosbury, James. 1817. The Righteousness of God Defended. London, UK: E. Bridgewater.

———. 1819a. The Anti-Newtonian. London, UK: Edward Bridgewater.

———. 1819b. Correspondence with the Board of Longitude. Online at https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-RGO-00014-00055/197.

———. 1819c. Reflections on the Inconsistency of Speculative Astronomy. London, UK: Richard and Arthur Taylor.

———. 1819–1823. Correspondence with the Board of Longitude. Online at https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-RGO-00014-00039/277.

Garwood, Christine. 2007. Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.

Schadewald, Robert J. 2015. The Plane Truth: A History of the Flat-Earth Movement [e-book]. Online at https://www.cantab.net/users/michael.behrend/ebooks/PlaneTruth/pages/index.html.

Sobel, Dava. 1995. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. New York, NY: Walker.

Weill, Kelly. 2022. Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

Note

1. A weird consequence of The Anti-Newtonian’s system of directions, which neither the booklet’s author nor Schadewald notes, is that space would be four-dimensional because north/south, east/west, up/down, and unknown/anti-unknown would presumably be pairwise orthogonal.