Cyrus Teed

Cyrus Teed

Koresh

Teed in later life, from a Library of Congress negative. He was a physician by training and by trade, and the cosmology arrived in the middle of that career rather than instead of it.

Born	18 October 1839, Trout Creek, New York
Died	22 December 1908, Estero, Florida, aged 69
Trade	Eclectic physician
Took the name	Koresh, after 1869[1]
The doctrine
Called	Koreshanity
Set out in	The Cellular Cosmogony[4]
Where we live	On the inside
The Sun	At the centre, and its own machine
The stars	Refractions
The survey
Instrument	The rectilineator
Built of	Mahogany and brass, in twelve-foot sections
Begun	2 January 1897, on the beach at Naples
Ran	About four miles
Directed by	Ulysses Grant Morrow
Found	That the surface rises to meet a level line
Because	Four miles of wood is not rigid

Cyrus Reed Teed (18 October 1839 – 22 December 1908) was an American physician who held that the Earth is a hollow shell and that we live on the concave side of it, with the Sun at the centre and the stars as refractions in the interior air. He called the doctrine Koreshanity, took the name Koresh for himself, and founded a community at Estero in Florida to keep it.^[1]

He is in this encyclopedia for what he did next. In 1897 the Koreshan Unity built an instrument and surveyed four miles of the Gulf coast with it, in order to settle the shape of the Earth by measurement. The survey was competently designed, patiently executed, and produced the wrong answer for a reason that had nothing to do with the sky.

The illumination

Teed trained as an eclectic physician and practised at Utica, New York, in a period when medicine, electricity and alchemy were not yet fully separated occupations. In the autumn of 1869, working on an alchemical experiment, he took a bad electric shock and lost consciousness.^[2]

What he described afterwards was a relaxation at the back of the head and a buzzing tension at the forehead, and then a visitation, in which the shape and government of the universe were explained to him. He took the account seriously for the remaining thirty-nine years of his life, and so did several hundred other people.

The story is often retold with a bathtub in it. There was no bathtub. There was a laboratory and a current, which is duller and more to the point: the man was electrocuted at his own bench, and what he took away from it was a cosmology.

The doctrine

Koreshanity holds that the universe is a cell. The Earth is its shell, and the whole of the sky is enclosed within it: the Sun hangs at the centre, half light and half dark, turning; the planets and stars are optical effects in the atmosphere between.^[3]

The arrangement is not arbitrary and it is not lazy. It is constructed to save the appearances: to leave the sky looking exactly as it does while turning the geometry of the sphere inside out. Every observation an astronomer can make from the ground, Teed's universe reproduces, because it was built backwards from those observations.

This is its strength as a doctrine and its weakness as a claim, and Teed understood the position better than most of his critics. If a model predicts what is already seen, the only thing that can separate it from the ordinary model is a measurement nobody has yet made.

So he had one made.

Estero

Followers began gathering at Estero, on the south-west coast of Florida, from 1894, and the Chicago operation moved down to join them by 1902. At its height, between 1903 and 1908, the settlement held rather more than two hundred and fifty people, with a printing house, a general store, a bakery and a machine shop.

They were building, on the evidence of what they left, a town rather than a camp.

The rectilineator

The question Teed set was the right one. On the ordinary Earth, a truly straight and level line drawn out from the surface departs from it, because the surface falls away: about eight inches in the first mile, and four times that in two miles, sixteen times in four. On Teed's Earth the surface would rise to meet the line instead. Four miles of straight line, laid carefully enough, would tell you which world you were standing on.

Teed did not dispute the figure. He published it:

The earth is a concave sphere, the ratio of curvation being eight inches to the mile, thus giving a diameter of eight thousand, and a corresponding circumference of about twenty-five thousand miles.
– The Cellular Cosmogony

Eight inches to the mile, a diameter of eight thousand: the ordinary numbers, carried over entire. The only thing Koreshanity alters is which way the curve bends, and that is precisely the one thing a straight line four miles long can settle.

The Air Line on the beach at Naples, in a cyanotype of the survey. The structure running away down the shore carried the apparatus, which was advanced along it twelve feet at a time. Whether four miles of it could be straight is a question the photograph raises before the article does.

The rectilineator was built to lay it. It was an apparatus of mahogany and brass in twelve-foot sections, each carrying spirit levels, telescopic sights and mirrored targets, so that a section could be aligned exactly with the one behind it and the line carried forward a length at a time.^[5] The survey began on 2 January 1897, on the beach at Naples, and worked south along the Gulf shore for about four miles. Ulysses Grant Morrow directed it.

It was slow, it was careful, and it was watched: Walter Haldeman, who had founded Naples, put the party up.

What it found

Over four miles, a straight level line should have stood ten feet eight inches clear of the water at the far end.

The Koreshan line did not. It converged on the surface and met it, and the party recorded that the water had risen to the line, which on their reading of the world was exactly what it should do. The result was published in The Cellular Cosmogony as a measurement of the Earth's concavity.^[4]

The apparatus sagged. A wooden beam four miles long, assembled twelve feet at a time and supported at intervals, cannot be rigid, and every section added its small droop to the ones before it; the line the Koreshans laid curved gently downward, and the sea, being where it had always been, came up to meet it.^[6]

The instrument, in other words, was reporting its own construction, and it reported it with the sign the builders were hoping for. That is the ordinary way of these things and not a special property of cranks: Dayton Miller spent thirty years on an aether drift that tracked the temperature of his hut, and Peter van de Kamp announced the first planet outside the solar system from a wobble that was his object glass being cleaned. Neither man was a Koreshan. The difference is that Teed knew what answer he wanted before the instrument was built.

Death

On 13 October 1906 Teed was badly beaten in Fort Myers by a town marshal, in the course of an altercation he had gone to break up. He never recovered his health and died at Estero on 22 December 1908, two years and two months afterwards.

His followers had understood that he would rise. They kept a vigil over the body and did not bury him. When it became plain what was happening to it, the county health officer required the burial, which was done after Christmas.

He was placed in a mausoleum on Estero Island, and the vigil resumed. It was kept around the clock for thirteen years.

On 23 October 1921 a hurricane took the mausoleum and its contents into the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing was recovered but the headstone, which stands at Estero today and reads Cyrus, Shepherd, Stone of Israel.^[7]

It is the only part of the arrangement that came back.

See also

• Peter van de Kamp – an instrument reporting itself, without a doctrine waiting for the answer
• Dayton Miller – thirty years of a signal his apparatus was making
• Hollow Earth – the same cavity, entered from the other side
• Flat Earth – the other cosmography built backwards from the appearances
• The figure of the Earth – the shape the survey was testing
• Bathybius haeckelii – a specimen manufactured by its own preservative, and given up by the man who described it
• The Allison effect – another apparatus ending in a judgement the builder was hoping to make
• Sphere – the surface he kept, and the side of it he moved us to

References

1. ^ Koresh is the Hebrew form of Cyrus, and the name of the Persian king who released the Jews from Babylon. Teed adopted it after 1869 and used it thereafter. The Koreshan Unity is unconnected with any later group of similar name.
2. ^ Autumn 1869, at Utica. Teed was working on an alchemical experiment, took a shock and was knocked unconscious; his own account describes a relaxation at the back part of the brain and a buzzing tension at the forehead before the vision.
3. ^ The inhabited surface is on the inside, and the whole of the observed sky is contained in a sphere of some eight thousand miles' diameter and twenty-five thousand miles' circumference: the ordinary figures for the Earth, unchanged. The Sun is a single body at the centre, half luminous, and its turning accounts for day and night without any motion of the Earth at all.
4. ^ The Cellular Cosmogony, or the Earth a Concave Sphere, published under Teed's name; much of the geodetic half is Morrow's work.
5. ^ Twelve-foot sections of mahogany with brass fittings, carrying spirit levels, telescopic sights and mirrored targets so that each could be set true against its predecessor. The design is sound in principle: the difficulty is that no material meets the specification it silently assumes.
6. ^ The analysis is Donald Simanek's. Even built as rigidly as good engineering allows, an apparatus of this kind cannot be perfectly rigid; the accumulated sag, together with a readiness to keep the readings that agreed and set aside those that did not, accounts for the published figures without any appeal to the shape of the world.
7. ^ The mausoleum stood at what is now Fort Myers Beach, on Estero Island. The watch on it was maintained continuously from the burial in December 1908 until the hurricane of 23 October 1921, thirteen years later. The headstone is held at the Koreshan State Historic Site.

External links

• Cyrus Teed – general reference for the dates, the community and the death
• Koreshan Unity – photographs of the community and the survey, most of them from the State Archives of Florida
• Dr. Cyrus R. Teed, cameo portrait – the Library of Congress, source of the portrait above, which is cropped to the cameo and levelled from their scan
• Koreshans setting up "The Air Line" rectilineator – State Archives of Florida, via Wikimedia Commons