"How the Father of Flat-Earthers Arose From a Nutty Commune"

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This just crossed my path a few minutes ago;

How the Father of Flat-Earthers Arose From a Nutty Commune
Manea Fen was a not very successful socialist commune in 19th-century Cambridgeshire, England, but it lives in history as the breeding ground of modern flat-earth belief.
Kelly Weill Reporter
Published Feb. 20, 2022 5:16AM ET

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-the-f ... e?ref=home

Its that canal experiment that is interesting.

His Nineteenth Century "classic experiment" utilizing that British canal- has risen from obscurity recently to haunt the internet and especially Utube.

Apparently he never even actually DID that experiment. It was all a lie. But modern investigators -freeze their butts wading in the water- to try to duplicate the experiment that he claimed to have done (but may never have done) to test the earth's shape.


If you have a straight canal of water that goes for miles then in theory you could photograph a toy sail boat at intervals to see if the [alleged] curve of the earth hides the lower parts of the boat. He claimed that he could photograph the whole boat including its lower portions at every distance -even out to the farthest miles of the straight canal. But later others got different results.

A funny thing is that canals are an interest and I follow several UK narrowboaters on YouTube but that canal experiment story simply will not stick and stay in my memory.

Also posted this on Starship Modeler forum and they (we) are having quite a lot of fun with it.

In my neck of the woods, the Koreshans believed the earth was hollow and we lived inside it. The sun, planets, clouds, etc. were down.

They also did experiments that involved taking measurements of the horizon on a beach. This proved we were inside the curve, rather the outside.

A state park now preserves their settlement and a museum their works.