Parallax: central claims

Project documents: Zetetic Astronomy. Earth Not a Globe! by "Parallax" (Samuel Birley Rowbotham [memory: high]), Bath/London, 1865, PDF of 229 pages (PDF page = book page + 5); and two copies of Gleason's 1892 "New Standard Map of the World" (flat-map.png and s-l1600.webp, the same image at two sizes).

Text note: the book's text layer is OCR on 228 of 229 pages and has number errors. Deep reads, with page images where numbers were doubtful, now cover the pendulum (PDF pp.138-159), eclipses and moonlight (pp.94-110), Orm's Head, Brighton and balloons (pp.18-25), geodesy (pp.49-67), the lighthouse list (pp.172-178), the Sun's circle and seasons (pp.80-90) and southern navigation (pp.26-30, 55-58). Sections not deep-read (tides, the burning interior, Neptune, scripture, the Sun triangulation, Polaris, the air-gun and tubes) rest on the digests plus page reads at QE (pp.46, 73-74, 78-79), so figures there are digest-level unless tagged otherwise. Nearly every observation in the book is quoted at second hand from other books, almanacs and journals; the deep reads have not seen the originals. No Source gap: the key work is readable. The map's text layer is garbled; it was read as an image.

1. The Earth is a stationary plane, with the north pole at its centre and the south a circumference of ice, not a globe spinning on its axis and orbiting the Sun (book Sections 1-2, 4, 6; the Gleason map draws this layout).
2. Level water proves it: the surface of standing water does not curve, shown by the Bedford Level canal (a flag and boat seen along 6 miles), the Southsea to Ryde sight (4.5 miles, eye 2.5 ft above the water; the OCR's "43" and "24 feet" are errors), Great Orm's Head seen from 100 ft at Douglas (60 miles), a Brighton line cutting a ship's rigging over 40 miles, a list of 18 lighthouses said to be seen beyond a globe's horizon (17 from Findlay's 1862 list; Findlay says refraction may add to his ranges), and a horizon that rises to eye level in balloons and in a mirror test.
3. Perspective, not curvature, explains ships sinking hull first: a "vanishing point" about 3000 times an object's height makes hulls disappear, and a powerful telescope can restore them on a calm surface; the same argument covers circumnavigation, the loss of a day and Polaris at low altitude.
4. The Sun, Moon and stars are small and near, and move over the fixed Earth: plane triangulation gives a Sun under 4,000 miles away and stars within 6,000 miles; eclipses of the Moon are not caused by the Earth's shadow (the Moon is self-luminous, since focused moonlight raises no thermometer). The eclipse sub-claim rests on named records: horizontal eclipses with the Sun above the horizon (Paris 1750, 1717, 1837 and Glaisher's 1590-1668 list, worded "apparently above the horizon"), and a visible, red Moon in total or deep partial eclipse (Avignon 1703; Forster and Walkey, 19 March 1848; Mrs Ward, partial eclipse of 7 Feb 1860; Glaisher, 1 June 1863). The moonlight evidence is De La Hire, Forbes and Lardner (no heat) and one second-hand Lancet report of 14 March 1856 of concentrated moonlight cooling a thermometer by more than 8 degrees.
5. The Foucault pendulum does not prove the Earth rotates: the author says the plane's turning is irregular in rate and direction (one cited case, Jones at Manchester, about 2.1 times the predicted rate in under 7 minutes), cannot show that the Earth rather than the pendulum moves, begs the question, and may come from a twisting ball-and-socket suspension; some experimenters reported the plane follows the magnetic meridian. The author reports no pendulum experiment of his own.
6. Orthodox astronomy rests on assumed premises and has failed its tests, the author says: examples are the Neptune prediction (Le Verrier's orbit and mass differed from the planet found), the air-gun and mast-drop experiments (no sign of the Earth's motion) and the tide explanation (a floating Earth rocking under air pressure). The geodesy rebuttals belong here: the seconds-pendulum length at the equator, London and the pole (39.027, 39.139 and 39.197 in) is put down to temperature and air density (on the book's own table the temperature effect is about 5.6e-4 against a length difference of 4.36e-3); meridian arcs (the Arbury Hill-Clifton table; Peru against Lapland) are said to disagree and to show an "oblong" Earth; "spherical excess" and the sea-horizon dip are put down to the magnifying lens of the theodolite; and surveyors' back-and-fore levelling and the House of Lords and Commons standing orders on a horizontal datum are read as abandoning curvature. The New Zealand seasons argument also belongs here: Wellington's day lengths (14 h 58 m and 9 h 2 m in the 1848 Cook's Strait Almanack) against England's (16 h 34 m and 7 h 45 m) and its brief twilight are said to contradict a globe, on the stated premise that New Zealand's latitude is "about the same as in England".
7. Scripture is literally true on the form of the Earth, so a proved plane answers atheism and the "plurality of worlds" (book Section 14).

Deep reads done: the pendulum section (PDF pp.138-159; the book's Foucault rate figures agree with 15 degrees per hour times the sine of latitude), and, after QE, pp.94-110, 18-25, 49-67, 172-178, 80-90 and 26-30 with 55-58 (see deep/earth-not-globe-book-c293c9.md). Still digest-level: tides (pp.111-115), the burning interior (pp.116-126), Neptune (pp.128-138), the Sun triangulation figures (pp.77-79, page-read at QE only), Polaris (p.46) and the air-gun and tubes (pp.73-76). The Orm's Head and southern-circuit figures carry arithmetic slips in the book that the deep reads recorded (for example 1,944 ft for 60 miles; 14,282 for 15,282).