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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• C. Fome — Disgraced exhibition-astronomer (b. 1738) whose celestial objects, shown to the paying public through his telescope, were revealed to be painted cards — the original Counterfeit Graphic Inserts (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.”
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• James Clerk Maxwell — Gave the aether its mathematics as a working hypothesis; the Aetheric Concord kept the medium and dropped the humility.
• 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.
• 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 — Mild cosmographer-host (c. 1801–1869), keeper of the Telluric Athenaeum and known as the Tutelar; held a flat, stationary earth gently, published nothing, and was never observed 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.
• 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.

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