Ulysses Morrow, who turned the world inside-out

May 2nd, 2007

While I’m busy moving house, please enjoy this classic SciencePunk article. Normal service will resume once I get my “office” unpacked.

Ulysses Morrow was a newspaper editor, inventor, and geodesist, who was asked by his friend Cyrus Teed to scientifically prove that the surface of the world was concave. Not only did Morrow accept this challenge – he succeeded in proving the inward curve of the Earth’s surface. This became known as the Naples Experiment.

Amongst other things, Teed believed the world was hollow, and that humans lived on the inside of that shell, with our feet pointing away from the center. Gravic rays kept us pressed against the ground, and when we looked up at the sun, we would in fact be looking in at the sun. All Teed needed was someone who could prove his theories, and that someone was Ulysses Morrow.

Morrow’s early experiments involved measuring the flatness of water. Visiting the Old Illinois Drainage Canal in 1896, Morrow used a telescope 12 inches above the waterline, to site a target 18 inches above the water surface, 5 miles away. Under accepted values of the Earth’s curvature, this target should have been over 9 feet below the waterline – but it wasn’t! Making similar observations the same year on the appearance of yachts from the shoreline, Morrow claimed his work to be “the most unmistakable evidence of the water’s non-convexity.” Critics dismissed the sightings as an artifact of atmospheric refraction. Morrow realised he needed a perfectly straight line to compare to the water’s surface, something like a giant ruler. But no such straight line existed. So Morrow decided to build one.

Morrow’s original design called for a number of perfect rectangles laid end to end in a perfectly straight row. These were adapted to “rectilineators”, 12 foot long, 4 foot wide wooden frames braced with steel crossbars. At the ends were brass fittings that would connect precisely with the next rectilineator, so that each could be aligned exactly with the previous. Once all were in place, the first would be removed and replaced at the end of the row, so that the straight edge could be continued. With help from Teed’s followers, Morrow’s apparatus was constructed on a beach near Naples, Florida, and Morrow’s straight edge slowly began to creep down the beach.

The vertical distance between the rectilineator and the mean water level was measured every 12 feet. If conventional views were correct, the distance between the reference mark and the water surface should increase as the world sloped away from the straight edge. If Teed was correct, the distance should get smaller – a little at first, and then increasing dramatically as the inward curve of the world became apparent. So what did they discover?

As they suspected: the surface of the Earth was concave! How did Morrow manage to find the world curving in the wrong direction? The problem was with the straight edge: it wasn’t straight. A design flaw in the rectilineator meant that the ends sagged – too slight to notice with the eye, but over the 1045 repeated placements this error increased to skew the results in Teed’s favour. It’s estimated that a sag of just 3 millionths of a degree would have been enough to undo the Naples Experiment. There is also evidence that Morrow produced a table of expected values – the results he expected to see – before the experiment. Experimenter bias may have been a factor in this just as it falsely convinced René Blondlot of the existence of N Rays.

Today some people still adhere to unusual and incredible models of the universe, but for the most part Teed’s Hollow Earth Theory has been an evolutionary dead-end.

Entry Filed under: Bad Scientists

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