Glacial Errata, No. 44

One: Winstanley’s Lighthouse

The first lighthouse built on the Eddystone reef, 19 km off of Plymouth Sound, was a wooden, octagonal structure designed by Henry Winstanley. The Eddystone Rocks, submerged at high tides, were a hazard long feared by mariners, but because of the treacherous and unstable conditions, it was difficult to erect a structure there. It was Henry Winstanley who finally overcame this challenge, designing a tower that was built over three years between 1696 and 1698.

During construction, a French privateer took Winstanley captive and destroyed the half-built tower, but was subsequently ordered to release the architect by Louis XIV, who commented, “France is at war with England, not with humanity.”

The tower was destroyed in 1703, during a great storm that erased almost all traces of the structure. Winstanley and the five other men in the tower at the time were never found.

At the time, of course, no one believed that the Earth was flat. Perhaps more importantly, no one believed that anyone had ever believed it was Flat; the sphericity of the Earth, everyone correctly knew, had been well established and uncontested fact for millennia.

Two: Rudyerd’s Lighthouse

A few years later, a new tower was built, this one designed by John Rudyerd (or Rudyard). Rudyerd’s tower was a smooth, conical shape, rather than Winstanley’s octagon—which made it more resistant to strong winds. Significantly stronger than the original tower, Rudyerd’s design would last nearly half a century.

During the entire time Rudyerd’s Lighthouse stood, the idea that people had once believed the Earth to be flat would have still been laughable. Watch a ship disappear on the horizon—any fool can see the curvature. The question of the Earth’s sphericity was not—and (I must stress) had never been—up for debate.

On December 2, 1755, the lantern caught fire, and while the workers escaped, the tower burnt to its foundation. Lighthouse keeper Henry Hall, 94 years old, died a few days later from ingesting molten lead; the lead extracted from his stomach is now in the National Museums of Scotland’s collection.

Three: Smeaton’s Lighthouse

John Smeaton, the engineer of the third lighthouse to stand on the Eddystone Rocks, made further architectural and design improvements upon his predecessors. The 59-foot high tower was made of masonry and stood for well over a century, at one point being painted with horizontal red and white bands to increase visibility.

During the tower’s extended life, the myth that people had once believed the Earth was flat was first introduced, primarily thanks to Washington Irving and Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University.

In his 1828 hagiography of Christopher Columbus, Irving concocted a bullshit scene in which the Italian mariner and future genocidaire squares off against the “Council of Salamanca” before his voyage westward. The superstitious priests claim that the Earth is flat, and that Columbus will sail right off it if he heads West. “To his simplest proposition, the spherical form of the earth,” Irving wrote, “were opposed figurative texts of scripture.”

White, a historian by trade, would later amplify this narrative. White hated Christianity, and envisioned his new college in Ithaca, New York, as “an asylum for Science—where truth shall be sought for truth’s sake, not stretched or cut exactly to fit Revealed Religion.” But White would not let truth get in the way of his own Revealed Religion, and happily cut and stretch history to make a polemical point against those he deemed excessively superstitious. In 1869, he delivered a speech entitled “The Warfare of Science” (later expanded into a two-volume book History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom), in which he claimed that Christians had long believed the Earth to be flat. According to White, the ancient Greek mathematicians knew the Earth to be a globe, but the early Church fathers “took fright at once” at this idea. “To them it seemed fraught with dangers to Scripture, by which, of course, they meant their interpretation of Scripture.”

It is a bit unclear as to whether White simply accepted Irving’s bullshit story because he was an incuriously bad historian, or knowingly repeated the lie because he was an unethically bad historian.

But by attempting to paint his opponents as dumber and more superstitious than they ever were, White helped open the doors to an actual belief in the Flat Earth, as now Flat Earthers could incorrectly claim that their belief was part of a longstanding, hallowed tradition, fraudulently and erroneously claiming that it emerged centuries ago and reflected a Biblical consensus that it most certainly never did. And they have leaned on this invented history ever since.

Four: The Great Flat Earth Experiment

It was Smeaton’s Lighthouse that would finally be drawn into the Flat Earth debate.

In the 1850s, a failed nostrum quack named Samuel Rowbotham began publishing articles and delivering lectures under the name “Parallax,” arguing that the Earth was a flat disc. Calling his method “Zetetic Astronomy,” he happily took on all comers, ultimately challenging a group of scientists to a scientific experiment to determine, once and for all, the shape of the Earth.

On October 24, 1864, Rowbotham met a group of scientists (including astronomer Richard Proctor) at Plymouth Sound. The experiment was simple: a telescope would be lined up as near to the waterline as possible, trained on the Eddystone Lighthouse. If Rowbotham was right, the entire lighthouse would be visible. His detractors, however, based on calculations of the Earth’s curvature, predicted that only the lighthouse’s lantern would be visible.

What they found instead was rather bizarre: both camps were wrong.

As it happened, on that October day not even the lantern was visible—only the very top-most part of the lighthouse could be seen through the telescope. Proctor, who wrote about the event, later deduced that the most likely explanation was light refraction, which had created an optical illusion that pushed the lighthouse even further down on the horizon.

Rowbotham, however, was elated. In a move common to cranks and conspiracists, he claimed victory. Sure, the entire lighthouse had not been visible as he had predicted. But the mainstream scientists, he countered, had also been wrong, and so he claimed vindication in his belief that they did not know what they were talking about, and that their science was no better than his.

By this point, the rocks that served as the foundation to Smeaton’s Lighthouse had begun to erode slightly, causing an instability in the tower’s base that caused it to rock side-to-side in strong winds. And the pernicious, idiotic and (I must stress this) brand-new idea of a Flat Earth had begun to take hold in the fringes of public consciousness.

Five: Douglass’s Lighthouse

The current lighthouse, designed by James Douglass, was first lit in 1882. Over twice as high as Smeaton’s, nearly 50 meters in height, it is now run by solar power and equipped with a helipad on its roof. The stub of Smeaton’s Tower still remains on an adjacent rock (visible in the colorized photo in the header for the newsletter), while the rest of the famous tower was reassembled on land at Plymouth Hoe and is now a tourist attraction.

Proctor’s revelation of light refraction as an explanation for what took place on that October Monday is a great reminder of what makes science interesting: There are always unknowns and ambiguities, always things we are still learning, things that don’t turn out quite how we expect. This is not, as Rowbotham and countless subsequent cranks have argued, proof that the scientific establishment is wrong. Rather, it is those perpetual ambiguities and confusions that make inquiry continually rewarding.

The problem, of course, is that admitting that there is still so much we do not know offers ammunition for bad faith actors, from cranks to climate-denying oil company shills, to loudly proclaim that the science is wrong. It gets harder and harder to have a good faith and informed conversation about what we still don’t know—particularly when it comes to things like evolution or climate change—without it being seized upon by assholes and nincompoops as evidence of what is most definitively not.

Meanwhile, the light still burns brightly on the Eddystone Rocks, a testament to several centuries of technological ingenuity and invention, of inquiry, failure, and refinement.