[Spingo]

A post by our good friend Tom Bishop got me wondering about this other book that much of flat earth doctrine is based on ; The Earth is not a Globe. by Samuel Birley Rowbotham Mr.

Incidentally Rowbotham is not a doctor nor does he have a PhD as has been claimed from Edinburgh University. I live in Edinburgh and I am an alumni and worked for the medical school for a couple of years. A few years ago in relation to an argument in another place I checked out the records of alumni and there is no mention of the name Rowbotham. They have a lot of records going back to the 1580s......I can categorically state he does not have a PhD from Edinburgh University Scool of medicine. A little known fact Charles Darwin did enrole as a medical student at Edinburgh, but only lasted a couple of months as he fainted at the sight of blood. I mention this as they were contemporaries Darwin being 7 years older.

Tom posted this on another thread that apparently comes straight from said book.

It does get darker. Look at the sun when it is directly overhead, and then look at the sun when it is near the horizon.

I went straight to; Section 6, Causes of Day and Night and the Seasons and straight away an error from Rowbotham leap off the page. One of his claims centres around Wellington in NZ being on a similar latitude to England.  Look this up if you will.  Like all of his claims its totally wrong. Wellington IS on a similar latitude to Barcelona in Spain around 41 degrees The latitude of London for example is around 51 degrees, a difference of 10 degrees from Wellington NZ.

Refer to pp 81.

Due to his error and false claim his whole chapter falls flat on its face. Why?  Because he maintained that London and Wellington should share the same length of daylight hours! ( which they don’t) as they shared a similar latitude (which they don’t) His argument for a flat earth in this section is based on a false premise. The interesting question is, how many more inaccuracies can be found?

 

[Spingo]

....sorry I should have included this in the main post but forgot!

Wellington latitude is 41.2865 south; day length on shortest day 21 June is 9hrs 11 mins 24 sec.
Barcelona latitude is  41.3851 north; day length on shortest day 21 Dec. Is 9 hrs 11 mins

I think this is a slam dunk!  The very argument Rowbotham tried to use to disprove the globe actually ends up trashing his claim of it being flat, while verifying its globular nature.

[RonJ]

Rowbotham poorly tries to play 'sailor' a lot and uses a few things he sees as 'proof' of the flat earth.  One example from his book is the example for not seeing the horizon lower while going higher above the level of the sea as proof that the earth is flat.  I will freely admit that seeing the effect is very somewhere between difficult and impossible to see on a moving ship.  However the 'height of eye' correction is always a factor in adjusting your sextant when making a sight of a 'heavenly body'.  The correction isn't much on a sail boat and probably of the ships of Rowbotham's time, but becomes significant on a large container ship where the bridge can be 150 feet above the water line. 

My guess would be that if Rowbotham was doing his 'research' today he might see his mistake and correct the erroneous statements he made in his book.  On the other hand if his observations were intentionally made with the idea to foster controversy then they can't be counted on to be accurate for that reason as well.  Since Rowbotham seemed to make a living arguing the flat earth paradigm in front of audiences (somewhat successfully) I can understand that any of his research was not aimed at furthering any scientific understanding, but to enhance the thickness of his wallet.  There's nothing at all wrong with someone making a living doing something they like but it's not the best idea to believe any of their research or experiments because their motivations are certainly not in the interests of science, but in the interests of money.

[Spingo]

Rowbotham poorly tries to play 'sailor' a lot and uses a few things he sees as 'proof' of the flat earth.  One example from his book is the example for not seeing the horizon lower while going higher above the level of the sea as proof that the earth is flat.  I will freely admit that seeing the effect is very somewhere between difficult and impossible to see on a moving ship.  However the 'height of eye' correction is always a factor in adjusting your sextant when making a sight of a 'heavenly body'.  The correction isn't much on a sail boat and probably of the ships of Rowbotham's time, but becomes significant on a large container ship where the bridge can be 150 feet above the water line. 

My guess would be that if Rowbotham was doing his 'research' today he might see his mistake and correct the erroneous statements he made in his book.  On the other hand if his observations were intentionally made with the idea to foster controversy then they can't be counted on to be accurate for that reason as well.  Since Rowbotham seemed to make a living arguing the flat earth paradigm in front of audiences (somewhat successfully) I can understand that any of his research was not aimed at furthering any scientific understanding, but to enhance the thickness of his wallet.  There's nothing at all wrong with someone making a living doing something they like but it's not the best idea to believe any of their research or experiments because their motivations are certainly not in the interests of science, but in the interests of money.

I would suggest given the tone of his book and the relatively poorly educated population at the time allied with the fact that NZ was a colony, it strikes me he was ‘chancing his arm’ hoping to pull some wool and fool his readership.

[RonJ]

Rowbotham does a little explanation of why the North Star disappears South of the Equator.  Of course what he doesn't explain is why the North Star should be at about 27 degrees above the horizon on the flat earth model when viewed from the equator.  You can do the math and prove this to yourself.  I suppose that Rowbotham assumes that the common person that pays to get into his debates wouldn't know enough about trigonometry to figure that out.  The idea of Rowbotham's talks were obviously not to disseminate any useful information, but to just allow him to make a living.  His skills were in defending his BS to mostly people who had limited knowledge about the things he was talking about but were willing to pay an admission fee.  I suppose it is kind of like a Flat Earth Conference these days, or maybe just a professional wrestling match.   

[Curiosity File]

So who is Rowbonham?
This guy drop out of school when he was 9 years old. Point of interest=9 years old drop out from schooling of the 1,800s.

"One of Rowbotham's followers, John Hampden, a Christian polemicist, gained notoriety by engaging in raucous public debates with leading scientists of the day. A bet involving the prominent naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in the famous Bedford Level experiment led to several lawsuits for fraud and libel and Hampden's imprisonment."

This is the guy that Tom Bishop and FES sites his experiments and writings or refers to this as evidence that backs FET claims. This is sited as science for FES.

Tom, what categorical isle and shelf would you find this book or books on if you went to a library?
Tom, do you mention these fact to readers when you refer them to Rowbotham's book?

   

[Curiosity File]

Rowbotham poorly tries to play 'sailor' a lot and uses a few things he sees as 'proof' of the flat earth.  One example from his book is the example for not seeing the horizon lower while going higher above the level of the sea as proof that the earth is flat.  I will freely admit that seeing the effect is very somewhere between difficult and impossible to see on a moving ship.  However the 'height of eye' correction is always a factor in adjusting your sextant when making a sight of a 'heavenly body'.  The correction isn't much on a sail boat and probably of the ships of Rowbotham's time, but becomes significant on a large container ship where the bridge can be 150 feet above the water line. 

My guess would be that if Rowbotham was doing his 'research' today he might see his mistake and correct the erroneous statements he made in his book.  On the other hand if his observations were intentionally made with the idea to foster controversy then they can't be counted on to be accurate for that reason as well.  Since Rowbotham seemed to make a living arguing the flat earth paradigm in front of audiences (somewhat successfully) I can understand that any of his research was not aimed at furthering any scientific understanding, but to enhance the thickness of his wallet.  There's nothing at all wrong with someone making a living doing something they like but it's not the best idea to believe any of their research or experiments because their motivations are certainly not in the interests of science, but in the interests of money.

I would suggest given the tone of his book and the relatively poorly educated population at the time allied with the fact that NZ was a colony, it strikes me he was ‘chancing his arm’ hoping to pull some wool and fool his readership.

The wool he did pull because he needed a way to make money since he dropped out of school when he was 9 years old.

[Max_Almond]

Here's an in-depth investigation of a Rowbotham claim I did last year, which you may find interesting:

https://forum.tfes.org/index.php?topic=9739.msg152310

(To summarise: he was very, very wrong about quite a lot of things, and then Eric Dubay repeated the claim, and added a few inaccuracies of his own, and included it in his '200 proofs' video that seems to have got the current flat earth movement started.)

Also, a project design on how to do the Bedford Level experiment properly:

https://forum.tfes.org/index.php?topic=9746.msg152467

(Clue to Rowbotham: don't sit in the water.)