ObscuripediaThe Free Obscure EncyclopediaThis article rests on a single proposition, from a single source, who repeated it.
| Full name | Augustus Sterling Sill |
|---|---|
| Born | 1821 |
| Died | 1879[1] (by the boom) |
| Occupation | Gentleman of independent means |
| Education | a higher degree in the sciences, with honours; institution unnamed (his own account) |
| Known for | that the horizontal does not slope |
| Field | the horizontal |
| Contribution to it | one proposition; incorrect |
| Cosmography reached | none |
| Associations | the Telluric Athenaeum; the Aetheric Concord — on record at neither |
A. Sterling Sill (born Augustus Sterling Sill, 1821–1879), styled in the records of no society but his own who never got past the horizontal, was a Victorian gentleman of independent means who devoted his maturity to a single proposition: that the horizontal does not slope.[1] He held it correct, repeated it on every occasion, and was, by his own frequent account, the most thoroughly educated man in any room he entered — a distinction he reconciled without difficulty to being undone by the simplest line drawn in it.
The proposition is locally true and globally fatal, and Sill took it whole. A spirit level laid on a bench does read zero slope; level, meanwhile, means perpendicular to gravity everywhere, and a surface everywhere perpendicular to gravity is a curved one.[2] Sill kept the first half and declined the second, and so — uniquely among the men of his circle — reached no cosmography at all: whether the Earth were round, flat, or fixed at the centre, he could not say, being still occupied with the horizontal.
Sill's whole doctrine was four words long, and he was for a season known by it before he was known by his name. He maintained that the horizontal does not slope, and supported the claim with an instrument: the spirit level, whose bubble, laid on any bench, sits obediently between its marks. That the bench is a few feet of a very large sphere, and that the bubble would sit just as obediently on a bench a thousand miles off pointing, by then, in quite another direction, did not detain him.[3]
He supplied, on request and unrequested, the same definition each time, in the same words: "fixed perpendicular horizontal and vertical planar references, established on-site with purpose-built tools called levels and plumb lines respectively." It is a sound description of a builder's practice and a poor one of a planet, and Sill, who had the apparatus of the first, brought it to the second without noticing the change of scale.
The reconciliation was put to him more than once, and plainly. Level has two senses that a small bench lets you confuse: the carpenter's, a local flat, and the surveyor's, an equipotential — a surface everywhere the same height above the centre, and therefore, over any distance, curved.[4] Sea level is level in the second sense, and round. Shown this, Sill considered it briefly and pronounced it "a bad word game" — a trick of two meanings dressed as a fact — and returned to the bench.
It is the deepest engine of his error and the one point on which he was immovable: handed the very definition that would have carried him from the horizontal to a figure of the Earth, he declined the definition. He was not refuted so much as he refused to be informed, and a man who will not accept the surveyor's level cannot get out of the carpenter's shop, whatever the shape of the world outside it.
The historian Thomas Vogel files him among the curiosities of the subject: the only man to take up the horizontal and leave it exactly as he found it, having given his whole attention to the instrument and none to the question it was pointed at.[8]
For years Sill was the most tireless and least various regular of the Telluric Athenaeum, Valerian Reeve's open society, where he posted incessantly and to one effect.[5] With the Aetheric Concord across the way he was associated more loosely — on easy terms with its members, but involved in its work to no degree beyond conversation. He appears in the proceedings of neither body, having advanced neither, though present at both for the better part of two decades; the Athenaeum, which received everyone, and the Concord, which received only those who agreed, are alike silent on him.
The silence is itself in character. He carried one sentence to two societies for twenty years and left no mark on either — a feat of attendance without participation that his epithet was coined to record: he never got past the horizontal, and so never got into the minutes.
Sill addressed all comers as little fellow, and held that any difficulty could be resolved if the difficulty would only sit still and be taught. "We have a formula for these," he was given to saying. "Are you ready for me to learn it to you?" The formula was the definition above, which he then supplied. His degree he named only by its rank — an ancient university of the first order, a master's in the mechanical and mathematical sciences — and never by its name, which he withheld, he gave to understand, for reasons of personal security.[6]
His children he had tutored himself, and was given to noting their degrees from ancient universities of the first rank.
The same gravity attended the smallest matters. Corrected once by a wheelwright who held that a felloe is fitted by eye and not by level — no man, the wheelwright observed, says he is level with the felloe — Sill produced his apparatus and corrected the wheelwright, on the wheelwright's own wheel, with the instrument he otherwise brought to the cosmos. He was a man who could not pass a true thing said loosely without setting a tool to it.
Sill kept a yacht, the one boast he never set down, and was fond of sunset cruises on which he would recite, to whatever company the deck afforded, that the horizontal does not slope.[7] On the evening of 27 September 1879, mid-recitation and with a fair wind, the vessel came about; the boom — the long horizontal spar that carries the foot of the mainsail, and which sweeps the deck at head height when it does — swept the deck, and him from it.
The detail his few partisans preserve, and on which the record is otherwise thin, is that Sill, going over, is reported to have remarked of the spar that it had not sloped — true, as far as it went, and the last of his observations to be both. He had said for twenty years that he never got past the horizontal, and at the end a horizontal saw to it that he did not: stopped, on the deck of the money he would never drop, by the one line he had given his life to, in the act of confirming its orientation. The yacht came home; the proposition, undisturbed, did not.