History
The first investigation was carried out by Samuel Birley Rowbotham (1816–1884), in the summer of 1838. He waded into the river and used a telescope held eight inches above the water to watch a boat with a five-foot mast row slowly away from him. He reported that the vessel remained constantly in his view for the full six miles to Welney bridge, whereas, had the water surface been curved with the accepted circumference of a spherical earth, the top of the mast should have been some eleven feet below his line of sight. He published this discovery under the title Zetetic Astronomy using the pseudonym Parallax in 1849 and subsequently expanded it into a book published in 1865.
Rowbotham repeated his experiments several times over the years but his claims received little attention until, in 1870, a supporter by the name of John Hampden offered a wager that he could show, by repeating Rowbotham's experiment, that the earth was flat. The noted naturalist and qualified surveyor Alfred Russel Wallace accepted the wager. Wallace, by virtue of his surveyor's training and knowledge of physics, avoided the errors of the preceding experiments and won the bet. The crucial step was to set a sight line 4 metres (13 ft) above the water. Despite Hampden initially refusing to accept the demonstration, Wallace was awarded the bet by the referee, editor of The Field sports magazine. Hampden subsequently published a pamphlet alleging that Wallace had cheated and sued for his money. Several protracted court cases ensued, with the result that Hampden was imprisoned for libel and threatening to kill Wallace. Wallace, who had been unaware of Rowbotham's earlier experiments, was criticized by his peers for "his 'injudicious' involvement in a bet to 'decide' the most fundamental and established of scientific facts".
In 1901 Henry Yule Oldham, a geography reader at King's College, Cambridge, claimed to have conducted the definitive experiment described in "Method", above.
The planists, however, were not yet defeated: On 11 May 1904 Lady Elizabeth Anne Blount hired a commercial photographer to use a telephoto lens camera to take a picture from Welney of a large white sheet she had placed, touching the surface of the river, at Rowbotham's original position six miles away. The photographer, Edgar Clifton from Dallmeyer's studio, mounted his camera two feet above the water at Welney and was surprised to be able to obtain a picture of the target, which should have been invisible to him given the low mounting point of the camera. Lady Blount published the pictures far and wide and for those who do not accept the explanation of Superior Mirage due to refraction, these have not been explained.
These controversies became a regular feature in the English Mechanic magazine in 1904–5, which published Blount's photo and reported two experiments in 1905 that showed the opposite results. One of these, by Clement Stratton on the Ashby Canal, showed a dip on a sight-line only 4 feet 9 inches (1.45 m) above the surface.
Read more about this topic: Bedford Level Experiment
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