Read Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio for Free Online
Authors: David Standish
puts it, he believed that there “the shell is thinnest on account of the polar flattening of the earth.”
At the age of eighty, Halley sat for what would be his last portrait. It is far different from the earliest known portrait of him at about age thirty, with long black hair dropping to his shoulders, in which he looks rather remarkably like a young Peter Sellers, with an expression on his face combining determination with a gleam of mischief in the eyes. In this later portrait his long wavy hair has gone white, he’s added a few pounds, and his face shows patient resolve, like he’d rather be anywhere else than sitting still for this portrait painter. He’s wearing a black velvet scholarly robe with lacy white shirt cuffs poofing out of the sleeves, and he seems to be standing in his library, with a number of large volumes on shelves behind him. It would be unremarkable but for the large sheet of paper he holds in his left hand, angled so the viewer can see what’s on it—a drawing of spheres within spheres, almost identical to the one appended to his 1692 paper on the hollow earth in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions. Of the hundreds of projects he’d involved himself in, with accolades given for his work in dozens of areas, he remained fond and proud enough of his hollow earth theory to have it memorialized in what he must have suspected would be the last official portrait done of him. Those natural philosophers, the Beach Boys, would approve: Be true to your school!
Halley would probably have been flattered, amused, and appalled at the uses to which his theory would be put in the years to come.
John Cleves Symmes portrait by John Audubon. (Collection of the New York Historical Society)
2
SYMMES’ HOLES
THE NEXT MAJOR HOLLOW EARTH EVENT BEGAN MODESTLY on April 10, 1818, in St. Louis, then the westernmost town of any size on the American frontier. Founded in 1764, the former French trading post had grown from a muddy backwater into a booming crossroads, becoming the stepping-off point to the West. The Lewis and Clark expedition embarked from there in 1804, the year after the Louisiana Purchase, an 827,987-square-mile tract of land that doubled the size of the country, bought from Napoleon at the bargain-basement price of a little under three cents an acre. In 1805 St. Louis was made the Territory of Louisiana’s seat of government, and then in 1812, capital of the Territory of Missouri. Between 1810 and 1820 the population increased 300 percent. When the War of 1812 concluded in December 1814 (not counting the belated Battle of New Orleans), people began pouring in there, whether seeking boomtown opportunity or simply stopping to take a few deep breaths and buy some (overpriced) pots and pans before heading farther west. One of the new steamboats first put in there in 1817, beginning a traffic that would give St. Louis a prominence in the West that would last until the coming of the railroad in the 1840s and 1850s, when previously piddling Chicago would eventually steal its thunder. In the years immediately after the War of 1812, St. Louis was ripping and roaring.
One of those who landed there after the war was Captain John Cleves Symmes.
On April 10, 1818, he commenced handing out a printed circular of his own composition. It was his bold mission statement:
CIRCULAR
Light gives light to discover—ad infinitum
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI TERRITORY, NORTH AMERICA
April 10, a.d. 1818
To all the World:
I declare the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees. I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in this undertaking.
JNO. CLEVES SYMMES
Of Ohio, late Captain of Infantry
N.B.—I have ready for the press a treatise on
At the age of eighty, Halley sat for what would be his last portrait. It is far different from the earliest known portrait of him at about age thirty, with long black hair dropping to his shoulders, in which he looks rather remarkably like a young Peter Sellers, with an expression on his face combining determination with a gleam of mischief in the eyes. In this later portrait his long wavy hair has gone white, he’s added a few pounds, and his face shows patient resolve, like he’d rather be anywhere else than sitting still for this portrait painter. He’s wearing a black velvet scholarly robe with lacy white shirt cuffs poofing out of the sleeves, and he seems to be standing in his library, with a number of large volumes on shelves behind him. It would be unremarkable but for the large sheet of paper he holds in his left hand, angled so the viewer can see what’s on it—a drawing of spheres within spheres, almost identical to the one appended to his 1692 paper on the hollow earth in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions. Of the hundreds of projects he’d involved himself in, with accolades given for his work in dozens of areas, he remained fond and proud enough of his hollow earth theory to have it memorialized in what he must have suspected would be the last official portrait done of him. Those natural philosophers, the Beach Boys, would approve: Be true to your school!
Halley would probably have been flattered, amused, and appalled at the uses to which his theory would be put in the years to come.
John Cleves Symmes portrait by John Audubon. (Collection of the New York Historical Society)
2
SYMMES’ HOLES
THE NEXT MAJOR HOLLOW EARTH EVENT BEGAN MODESTLY on April 10, 1818, in St. Louis, then the westernmost town of any size on the American frontier. Founded in 1764, the former French trading post had grown from a muddy backwater into a booming crossroads, becoming the stepping-off point to the West. The Lewis and Clark expedition embarked from there in 1804, the year after the Louisiana Purchase, an 827,987-square-mile tract of land that doubled the size of the country, bought from Napoleon at the bargain-basement price of a little under three cents an acre. In 1805 St. Louis was made the Territory of Louisiana’s seat of government, and then in 1812, capital of the Territory of Missouri. Between 1810 and 1820 the population increased 300 percent. When the War of 1812 concluded in December 1814 (not counting the belated Battle of New Orleans), people began pouring in there, whether seeking boomtown opportunity or simply stopping to take a few deep breaths and buy some (overpriced) pots and pans before heading farther west. One of the new steamboats first put in there in 1817, beginning a traffic that would give St. Louis a prominence in the West that would last until the coming of the railroad in the 1840s and 1850s, when previously piddling Chicago would eventually steal its thunder. In the years immediately after the War of 1812, St. Louis was ripping and roaring.
One of those who landed there after the war was Captain John Cleves Symmes.
On April 10, 1818, he commenced handing out a printed circular of his own composition. It was his bold mission statement:
CIRCULAR
Light gives light to discover—ad infinitum
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI TERRITORY, NORTH AMERICA
April 10, a.d. 1818
To all the World:
I declare the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles twelve or sixteen degrees. I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in this undertaking.
JNO. CLEVES SYMMES
Of Ohio, late Captain of Infantry
N.B.—I have ready for the press a treatise on
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