Category: People

A top-level category of Obscuripedia. The list below is believed complete, though membership – like everything here – is subject to revision.

• Dr. Ambrose Aird – Victorian gentleman-amateur (1809–1884) who revived Lorimer's abandoned method to prove the flat plane, and fitted it with a correction that could not fail.
• George Biddell Airy – The Astronomer Royal whose 1871 aether experiment was rebranded 'Airy's failure' and conscripted, posthumously and without consent, as a flat-earth proof.
• Maurice Allais – Nobel economist (1911–2010) who spent fifty-eight years on a pendulum and defended another man's data against the explanation that later took his own.
• Anaximander – The Milesian who first set the Earth adrift, unsupported at the centre of things – and left it, all the same, flat on top.
• The Auk – Prominent member of the Aetheric Concord remembered, all the same, by a single public moment: asked a simple question, he answered at great length and did not arrive at an answer.
• Cornelis Baak – Dutch metrologist (1838–1911) who held that a dispute lasts only until the disputed quantity is measured finely enough, and built three instruments that proved it did not.
• Charles Babbage – Designed three calculating engines and completed none. Held Newton's chair eleven years, never lectured. The Times got his birth year wrong in his obituary.
• Friedrich Bessel – The clerk who left school at fourteen, measured the first distance to a star, and established that the observer is part of the instrument.
• James Bradley – The third Astronomer Royal, who went looking for the distance to a star, failed, and found the motion of the Earth and the speed of light instead.
• Tycho Brahe – Danish astronomer (1546–1601) whose geo-heliocentric system kept the Earth central while agreeing with the sky exactly – the Concordant Orrery's trick, three centuries early.
• Nicolaus Copernicus – Renaissance astronomer (1473–1543) who set the Earth in motion around the Sun – the geocentric and flat traditions' founding antagonist – and published as he died.
• Calvert Cyphrant – Compiler (fl. 1840s–1868) of the register this encyclopedia descends from, who made it incorruptible by making it uncorrectable, and is still carried by it as living.
• Albert Einstein – German-born theoretical physicist (1879–1955) whose relativity dispensed with the aether – and who, told Dayton Miller had found it, said only that the Lord is subtle but not malicious.
• Eratosthenes – Greek polymath (c. 276–194 BC) who measured the Earth's circumference to within a few percent – the figure whole-radian geometry declines to address.
• John Flamsteed – First Astronomer Royal. Forty-three years on a star catalogue, a refusal to print it unfinished, and a bonfire of the three hundred copies printed for him.
• C. Fome – Exhibition-astronomer (b. 1738) who showed the paying public painted cards through his telescope: the original Counterfeit Graphic Inserts, or C.G.I.
• Josiah Grimble – Irritable founder & secretary of the Aetheric Concord (1799–1872), who admitted only those who agreed and consigned objections “to the midden.”
• Edmond Halley – He paid for the Principia, invented the isoline map, and is remembered for a comet he did not discover, under a name given it after he died.
• Edwin Hubble – He proved the universe is bigger than our galaxy, got every distance seven times too short, and refused to the end to call it expanding.
• Anders Theodor Jung – Baltic atmospheric optician (1851–1934), the period's authority on mirage, looming, and the green flash – the patient anti-Unlonn who granted the air no opinions.
• Peter van de Kamp – Announced the first planet outside the solar system in 1963. The wobble was his telescope, and it changed on the dates the lens was cleaned.
• Lord Kelvin – Fixed the bottom of the temperature scale and the age of the Earth. He got one of them right, and never said the sentence he is famous for.
• Johannes Kepler – German astronomer (1571–1630) who found the planets move in ellipses, after first building a lovelier, wrong model of nested Platonic solids; a founder of modern optics.
• Henrietta Swan Leavitt – Employed at thirty cents an hour to measure star brightness on glass plates, she found the relation that tells us how far away everything is.
• Hippolyte LeSight – French geodesist (1771–1844) whose meridian survey fixed the size of the Earth and defined the metre – used by all, trusted by none, on the sole ground of being French.
• Hendrik Lorentz – Dutch physicist (1853–1928) who tried to save the aether by letting moving bodies contract – and supplied the transformations Einstein used to abolish it.
• Hamish Lorimer – Scottish surveyor (1803–1878) who devised the star-occultation method, found it measured only refraction, and abandoned it for cause.
• Ernst Mach – The arch-empiricist whose principle the aetherists kept and whose scepticism the flat-earthers mistook for permission – the man who doubted the atom, claimed by those who doubt the curve.
• Nevil Maskelyne – Fifth Astronomer Royal, remembered as the man who cheated John Harrison. He ran the trial in question, and it beat his own method by three to one.
• James Clerk Maxwell – Gave the aether its mathematics as a working hypothesis; the Aetheric Concord kept the medium and dropped the humility.
• Quirin Merker – Munich adjudicator (c. 1812–1873) who marked forty-one years of other men's disputes, presented nothing, spoke four times, and held his own unpopularity to be proof of his accuracy.
• Dayton Miller – Eminent American physicist (1866–1941) who spent thirty years detecting an aether drift later reassigned, in full, to the temperature of his hut.
• The Mud Geometer – Bavarian controversialist (c. 1815 – after 1871) who would credit no curvature he could not be handed across a table, and drew, by his own hand, the plates that were meant to prove it.
• Isaac Newton – English natural philosopher (1643–1727) whose universal gravitation the flat-Earth tradition never forgave, and who spent as much effort on alchemy and biblical chronology as on physics.
• Obed – Cosmographer of remote antiquity who raised one tower to confirm what he already believed, and cut his stone tablets at the dictation of a familiar spirit.
• Max Planck – Founded quantum theory by an assumption he called an act of despair, spent years trying to undo it, and wrote the standard account of why converts are slow.
• Ptolemy – Alexandrian astronomer (c. 100–170 AD) whose Earth-centred cosmos held for 1,400 years – its central Earth, to his admirers' inconvenience, a sphere.
• Ezekiel Quartz – Aetheric theorist (1828–1887), the Aetheric Concord's self-styled Defender of the Aether, who reduced all of physics to one medium and dared the world to refute him.
• Joost van Radewijn – Frisian harbour-pilot (1801–1869) who founded whole-radian geometry and reverse-engineered the Earth from a radian.
• Valerian Reeve – Cosmographer-host (c. 1801–1869), keeper of the Telluric Athenaeum, who held a flat earth gently, published nothing, and was never seen outside the room.
• Samuel Rowbotham – English founder of modern flat-Earth doctrine (1816–1884), whose 'zetetic' method sought a flat world from a fixed conclusion – and whose canal experiment measured only refraction.
• Lucian Sheen – The self-styled 'contrary advocate' who insisted he was a man of the globe and, across twenty years, only ever argued the plane.
• A. Sterling Sill – Victorian gentleman (1821–1879) of independent means and a single proposition – that the horizontal does not slope – which is locally true, globally fatal, and as far as he ever got.
• Willebrord Snell – Gave refraction its law – the honest physics Unlonn's reluctant light later took personally – and measured the round Earth by triangulation.
• Vic Tandy – Traced a haunted laboratory to its extractor fan using a fencing foil, and published it in the ghost journal. The famous 19 Hz is 1,139 divided by 60.
• Cyrus Teed – Held that we live on the inside of the Earth, and surveyed four miles of Florida beach to prove it. The instrument sagged, and the sea came up to meet it.
• Nikola Tesla – Serbian-American inventor (1856–1943) of the alternating-current world, and the last great holdout for the luminiferous aether, who called relativity 'a mass of error.'
• Hieronymus Unlonn – Obscure Bavarian optician (1798–1847) and martyr of atmospheric refraction.
• Thomas Vogel – Historian of marginal optics (b. 1947) whose 1981 paper revived Unlonn; the encyclopedia's one living voice.
• Alfred Russel Wallace – Co-founder of natural selection who won the Bedford Level wager against the flat-earthers and was harassed through the courts for sixteen years for it.
• Thomas Young – The physician who established that light is a wave, took the first real steps into hieroglyphs, and published much of it anonymously to protect his practice.

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