Samuel Rowbotham

Samuel Birley Rowbotham (1816-1884), English inventor, writer, utopian socialist and quack doctor - who wrote Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe under the pseudonym 'Parallax'.

Originally a 16-page pamphlet (1849), later expanded into a book (1865; a new edition 1881), his 'zetetic astronomy' models the Earth as a flat disc centred on the North Pole, ringed by an ice wall, with the Sun, Moon and stars moving only several thousand miles above the surface. His work is generally credited with the modern revival of belief in a flat Earth - the movement is a 19th-century invention, not an ancient one. Experiment 15 of Earth Not a Globe (the 'horizon is always at eye level' test) is still the template for the most common flat-earth claim today.

Built on a rejection of Newtonian astronomy (he claimed to have questioned Newton from age seven). Enabled everything the /debunk family answers: the horizon claim (the dip experiment traces its origin to his experiment 15), the ice-wall Antarctica (the TFE expedition tested it), and the modern movement itself (the 'ancient belief' debunk).