This was just before the launch of the first artificial satellite and when satellite images taken from outer space showed the Earth as a sphere rather than flat, the society was undaunted Shenton remarked: “It’s easy to see how a photograph like that could fool the untrained eye.” Due to Shenton’s interest in alternative science and technology, the emphasis on religious arguments was less than in the predecessor society. In 1956, Samuel Shenton, a signwriter by trade, created the International Flat Earth Society as a successor to the Universal Zetetic Society and ran it as “organizing secretary” from his home in Dover, in Britain. After World War I, the movement underwent a slow decline. Later it achieved some notoriety by being involved in a scam involving dental practices.
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In 1901, she repeated Rowbotham’s Bedford Level Experiment and photographed the effect, sparking a correspondence in the magazine English Mechanic with several counter-claims. A flat Earth journal, Earth: a Monthly Magazine of Sense and Science, was published between 1901–1904, edited by Lady Blount. The society published a magazine entitled The Earth Not a Globe Review, and remained active well into the early part of the 20th century.
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He also edited “ The Zetetic and Anti-Theorist: a monthly journal of practical cosmography“.Īfter Rowbotham’s death, Lady Elizabeth Blount, wife of the explorer Sir Walter de Sodington Blount, established a Universal Zetetic Society, whose objective was “ the propagation of knowledge related to Natural Cosmogony in confirmation of the Holy Scriptures, based on practical scientific investigation“. Council members in New York included the US Consul to China and the superintendent of Baltimore public schools. Rowbotham created a Zetetic Society in England and New York, shipping over a thousand copies of Zetetic Astronomy. One such debate, involving the prominent naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, concerned the Bedford Level experiment (and later led to several lawsuits for fraud and libel). Rowbotham and his followers, like William Carpenter who continued his work, gained attention by engaging in public debates with leading scientists of the day. He also published a leaflet entitled “ The inconsistency of Modern Astronomy and its Opposition to the Scriptures!!” which argued that the “Bible, alongside our senses, supported the idea that the earth was flat and immovable and this essential truth should not be set aside for a system based solely on human conjecture”. According to Rowbotham’s system, the earth is a flat disc centered at the North Pole and bounded along its southern edge by a wall of ice (Antarctica), with the sun and moon 3000 miles (4800 km) and the “cosmos” 3100 miles (5000 km) above earth. Based on his incorrect interpretation of experiments on the Bedford Level, Rowbotham published a 16-page pamphlet, called “Zetetic Astronomy”, which he later expanded into a 430-page book, Earth Not a Globe, expounding his views. Modern hypotheses supporting a flat Earth originated with English inventor Samuel Rowbotham (1816–1884). By the early Middle Ages, it was widespread knowledge throughout Europe that the Earth was a sphere. Aristotle was one of the first thinkers to propose a spherical Earth in 330 BC.
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The belief that the Earth was flat was typical of ancient cosmologies until about the 4th century BC, when the Ancient Greek philosophers proposed the idea that the Earth was a sphere, or at least rounded in shape. The formal society was inactive after Johnson’s death in 2001, but was resurrected in 2004 by its new president Daniel Shenton. Johnson, who based the organization in his home in Lancaster, California. The modern organization was founded by Englishman Samuel Shenton in 1956, and later led by Charles K. The Flat Earth Society (also known as the International Flat Earth Society or the International Flat Earth Research Society) is an organization that seeks to further the belief that the Earth is flat, instead of an oblate spheroid.