Saturday, July 21, 2018

Before Jules there was John...


John Cleves Symmes Jr.

Before Jules Verne published Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the center of the Earth) in November of 1864 there were declarations of the Hollow Earth Theory, namely lead by John Cleves Symmes Jr.

John Cleves Symmes Jr. (November 5, 1780 – May 28, 1829) was an American Army officer, trader, and lecturer. Symmes is best known for his 1818 variant of the Hollow Earth Theory, which introduced the concept of openings to the inner world at the poles.

Symmes Declaration and reaction
On April 10, 1818, Symmes announced his Hollow Earth theory to the world, publishing his Circular No. 1. While a few enthusiastic supporters would ultimately lionize Symmes as the "Newton of the West", in general the world was not impressed.

Symmes had sent his declaration (at considerable cost to himself) to "each notable foreign government, reigning prince, legislature, city, college, and philosophical societies, throughout the union, and to individual members of our National Legislature, as far as the five hundred copies would go." Symmes' son Americus wrote of the reaction to Circular No. 1 in 1878, recounting "[i]ts reception by the public can easily be imagined; it was overwhelmed with ridicule as the production of a distempered imagination, or the result of partial insanity. It was for many years a fruitful source of jest with the newspapers." Symmes, though, was not deterred. He began a campaign of circulars, newspaper letters, and lectures aimed at defending and promoting his hypothesis of a Hollow Earth—and to build support for a polar expedition to vindicate his theory.

Symmes' theory

In its original form, Symmes' Hollow Earth theory described the world as consisting of five concentric spheres, with our outer earth and its atmosphere as the largest. He visualized the Earth's crust as being approximately 1,000 miles (1,610 km) thick, with an Arctic opening about 4,000 miles (6,450 km) wide, and an Antarctic opening around 6,000 miles (9,650 km) wide. Symmes proposed that the curvature of the rim of these polar openings was gradual enough that it would be possible to actually enter the inner earth without being aware of the transition. He argued that due to the centrifugal force of Earth's rotation, the Earth would be flattened at the poles, leading to a vast passage into the inner Earth. Symmes' concept of polar openings connecting the Earth's surface to the inner Earth was to be his unique contribution to Hollow Earth lore. Such polar openings would come to be known as "Symmes Holes" in literary Hollow Earths.
Symmes held that the inner surfaces of the concentric spheres in his Hollow Earth would be illuminated by sunlight reflected off of the outer surface of the next sphere down and would be habitable, being a "warm and rich land, stocked with thrifty vegetables and animals if not men". He also believed that the spheres revolved at different rates and upon different axis, and that the apparent instability of magnetic North in the Arctic could be explained by travelers moving unawares across and along the verge between the inner and outer earths.

Symmes generalized his theory beyond just the Earth, claiming that "the Earth as well as all the celestial orbicular bodies existing in the inverse, visible and invisible, which partake in any degree of a planetary nature, from the greatest to the smallest, from the sun down to the most minute blazing meteor or falling star, are all constituted, in a greater or less degree, of a collection of spheres".

Ultimately, Symmes was to simplify his theory, abandoning the series of concentric inner spheres, and teaching "only one concentric sphere (a hollow earth), not five" by the time he embarked on his lecture tour of the East Coast.

Symmes Atomic Clock





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