Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio (2 page)

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Authors: David Standish

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BOOK: Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizatio
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Although the distinction between “hollow” and “riddled with subterranean labyrinths” is sometimes unclear, I have leaned as much as possible toward truly “hollow,” and so haven’t discussed such popular underground realms as Alice’s Wonderland or other cavern-like subterranean places. What I have tried to do here is trace the permutations on Halley’s idea from his time down to the present. The story weaves in and out of literature and what passes for real life, and veers over into the charmingly delusional more than once. It includes writers major and minor, scientists, pseudo-scientists, religious visionaries and cranks, explorers, evil dictators, New Agers, scam artists, and comic book characters.
One thing I found fascinating was the hollow earth idea’s continuing elasticity—it has been equally useful as a late-seventeenth-century scientific theory, an expression of early-nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny, a vehicle for mid-nineteenth-century musings on paleontology and Darwin, late-nineteenth-century religious utopianism, Teddy Roosevelt–style imperialism, a perfect creepy vehicle for 1950s Cold War paranoia, and a cozy home for dreamy contemporary New Age utopias.
There have been many books recently about important ideas or commodities that have changed the world. This one, I am happy to say, traces the cultural history of an idea that was wrong and changed nothing—but which has nevertheless had an ongoing appeal.
 
Portrait of Edmond Halley at age eighty in 1736. He is holding one of his drawings of the earth’s interior spheres. (Reproduced by permission of the President and Council of the Royal Society)
1
 
HOLLOW SCIENCE
 
THREE TIMES LATE IN 1691 EDMOND HALLEY
stood before the London Royal Society to read papers proposing that the earth is hollow, or nearly so. In a carefully elaborated hypothesis based on principles expressed in Newton’s landmark
Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica
(which Halley had helped bring to publication in 1687), he suggested that three concentric spheres lay beneath the surface, turning independently on a north–south axis, each smaller than the next, all nesting within one another, rather like
matrushkas,
those adorable Russian dolls. He theorized further that there might be life inside, supported by a source of light like that of the sun itself.
Here was a new sort of thinking about the earth’s interior, qualitatively different from all earlier ideas. Not the dark flowering of fearful, gloomy meditation on death; not conjecture about the eternal reward or punishment of fragile, ineffable souls; not mythology or religion or metaphysics, but science. A serious stab at it, at any rate.
Why was he thinking these peculiar thoughts?
Scientific curiosity, certainly, but a curiosity driven by commerce as well.
Today Edmond Halley is known only for the comet of 1682, which he predicted would return in 1758. Until the late seventeenth century, comets were little understood and greatly feared, omens of terrible portent, an alarming anarchic presence in the otherwise orderly heavens. Their motions had been a great mystery. In 1680, a comet had for weeks cut a brilliant path through the night sky, seemingly hurtling toward oblivion on a collision course with the sun. The following year yet another came catapulting in the opposite direction through the solar system on its way to some unimaginable destination. Halley determined that these were not two comets, but one, traveling an epic ellipse on a regular circuit, as did the comet posthumously named for him. Its interval of seventy-four to seventy-nine years (occasional close swipes with the gravitational pull of Jupiter and Saturn slightly alter the timing) means it had been visible at Agrippa’s death in 12 B.C.E., Attila’s defeat at Chalons in 451 C.E., and the Norman conquest of England in 1066 (it’s shown blazing across a section of the Bayeux Tapestry, with a group of frightened onlookers pointing skyward at it). Maybe there was something to the idea of portents, after all. It has been repeatedly suggested that the Star of Bethlehem was a comet—perhaps Halley’s.
Halley would be important to the history of science if only for his influence on Newton’s
Principia.
The train of thought leading to it was triggered by discussions Halley provoked with Newton about planetary orbits, and Halley not only nudged Newton along during the three years he spent writing it, he also served as editor and publisher, carefully reading and correcting page proofs.
Principia
appeared under the imprint of the Royal Society, but the money to pay the printer came out of Halley’s own pocket. At every stage he shepherded it along.
It seems fitting, then, that Halley’s hollow earth theory was the first scientific hypothesis to draw on Newton’s revolutionary ideas, and it wasn’t as off the wall as it may seem.
Throughout his life Halley pursued far-ranging interests and scientific investigations. Elected to the Royal Society in 1678 at the age of twenty-two, over the years he presented papers to that body on a hodgepodge of subjects. “The annals of the Royal Society are littered with enterprising papers by Halley,” writes Lisa Jardine in
Ingenious Pursuits,
“on everything from the global patterns of trade winds, to the mechanics of diving bells, the rise and fall of mercury in the barometer, compass variation, and the beneficial effects of opium-taking.” Of the last, he tried it and liked it. “Instead of sleep,” he wrote in his January 1690 paper, “which he did design to procure by it, he lay waking all night, not as if disquiet with any thoughts but in a state of indolence, and perfectly at ease, in whatsoever posture he lay.”
Such catholicity of interest was true to the idea of the Royal Society at its founding in 1660. One member, Henry Oldenburg, described the group as “a Corporation of a number of Ingenious and knowing persons—for improving Naturall knowledge, whose dessein it is, by Observations and experiments to advance ye Contemplation of Nature to Use and Practice.”
1
Members included Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Christopher Wren. These were some of the chief laborers constructing a new machine. Together and separately they were fashioning the first cogs and wheels of that whirring rational device, the Enlightenment. The dreamy romanticism that had passed for thought until then—magic, alchemy, astrology, even religion—was being buried, and a shiny new mechanical creature was being put together piece by piece: the universe, newly seen!
The first tangible signs of the Enlightenment-to-be came early in the seventeenth century, with the initial stirrings of what became known as the scientific revolution. Francis Bacon kicked things off by overturning Aristotle and proposing a search for knowledge not through antiquarian study but by firsthand investigation—the basis for the scientific method. This was accompanied by a technological revolution still going full tilt in Halley’s time. Dutch eyeglass maker Hans Lippershey had registered the first known patent for a telescope in The Hague in October 1608, and not a year later Galileo began pointing one of his own construction at the night sky, soon observing mountains on the moon and sunspots, discovering four satellites of Jupiter, and confirming Copernican theories about a heliocentric universe. Sir Isaac Newton first gained notice in 1671 by presenting the Royal Society with a reflecting telescope of his own design. Meanwhile Robert Hooke was looking in the opposite direction through compound microscopes he devised to peer into previously invisible worlds. His self-illustrated
Micrographia,
an early “coffee table” book published in 1665, inspired Samuel Pepys to buy a microscope and encouraged Anton van Leeuwenhoek, a merchant in Holland, to make his own microscopes from lenses he ground himself. Van Leeuwenhoek began sending to the Royal Society his exquisite drawings of the creatures he was discovering in ordinary drops of water: “an incredible number of very small animals of divers kinds.”
Major advances in precision clock making were also ticking along, another component in this surge of technical innovation and an important part of the scientific revolution itself, since much of what was being studied depended on accurate measurement of time—especially in relation to astronomy, navigation, and surveying. Clocks before the seventeenth century were large, crude devices that never kept anything close to true time. The minute hand wasn’t added until 1670. In 1582 Galileo had observed the timekeeping properties of pendulums, and in 1656 Dutch astronomer and physicist Christian Huygens applied this principle to clock making with notable results. In 1675 he had one of those eureka! moments, thinking of a way to regulate a clock using a fixed coiled spring. This innovation led to smaller watches (though the often contentious Robert Hooke complained that he’d made a spring-regulated clock ten years earlier) that could be used onboard ships, since calculating exact time was the crucial missing component in the search to establish accurate longitude.
Much of this new scientific activity, especially in regard to astronomy and improvements in clock making, was being driven by economic and military interests, as were Halley’s speculations on the hollow earth.
In the seventeenth century England became a true maritime power. From the time of the Restoration (1660) onward, English shippers began rivaling the Dutch, the world’s greatest traders. In the many tangled wars that bloodied the century (between 1650 and 1700, for instance, the English fought three wars against the Dutch and were allied with them in a fourth against the French), the sceptered isle was duking it out with rivals on the open seas and putting together a colonial empire with far-flung holdings the world over. (One notable addition came in 1664, when they seized New Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed it for the duke of York.) This meant more and more ships crisscrossing the oceans. Naturally they all had to know where they were and where they were going, as any miscalculation could lose money and lives. All those sunken wrecks full of lost plunder are tribute to what was at stake.
Determining latitude was a breeze, achieved by taking an angle on the sun or the polestar. But longitude was a bitch. Theoretically the easiest way to determine longitude was to establish a universal time at a prime meridian and then compare that to local time, applying a simple formula to calculate the distance from the prime meridian. But accurate clocks wouldn’t exist until well into the next century, when John Harrison developed his famous watch and finally, after much cheap dodging on the Royal Society’s part, won the celebrated Longitude Prize of £20,000 (about $12 million today), which had gone begging for fifty years. Until then, the next best thing was fanatically detailed astronomical tables.
In the seventeenth century, astronomy was a weapon in the national arsenal. For example, in 1675 King Charles II was persuaded to okay funding for the Greenwich Observatory. He did this because the sneaky, underhanded French had built one, and he didn’t want England to be faced with an observatory gap! The first scientific institution in Great Britain, it was essentially built as a military installation. The money came from the budget of the Ordnance Department, which, as Lisa Jardine observes, was the Restoration equivalent of the Pentagon. The goal was greater accuracy and detail in astronomical charts—pinpointing the positions of the stars, the moon, and even the moons of Jupiter. Prior to trustworthy seagoing chronometers, celestial bodies were the most reliable way of determining longitude, distant clocks shining in the nighttime sky.
In 1676 twenty-year-old Halley left Oxford without graduating and eagerly journeyed to the island of St. Helena, a patch of land belonging to the East India Company located 1,200 miles west of Africa’s southwestern coast. Arriving in 1677, there he spent a year mapping the night sky, returning in 1678 to produce a catalog of the celestial longitudes and latitudes of 341 stars—the first of its kind for that hemisphere and a considerable aid to navigation. As we’ll see, navigational concerns led Halley to his theory of the hollow earth, as he attempted to explain variations in the earth’s magnetic poles.
The magnetic compass had come into use during the twelfth century; and while valuable in a general way, sailors soon found that compasses had the annoying habit of significantly deviating from true north. Worse, there was no evident pattern or consistency to the magnetic variation. The lines of the earth’s magnetism bend away from true north, and at any given place these variances themselves vary over time. Understanding the causes might lead to the ability to predict variation and thus compensate for readings that had been misleading sailors for centuries. (Another difficulty lay in New World real estate; territorial boundaries established with simple compasses caused constant legal wrangling as magnetic variation shifted.)

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