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After he expounded his views in Zetetic Astronomy, published under the pseudonym “Parallax,” a parade of his followers—including John Hampden, who debated Alfred Russel Wallace about the shape of the Earth; Lady Blount, who wrote a wish-fulfillment novel featuring flat-Earthery; and Samuel Shenton, who established the International Flat Earth Research Society—kept the flat Earth in the British public eye.

The Universal Zetetic Society sputtered out but was revived under different names over the years—in 1956, 1972, and 2004.

The modern case for a flat Earth derives largely from “Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe,” a book published, in 1865, by a smooth-talking English inventor and religious fundamentalist named Samuel Rowbotham.

In 1884, Henry Ossipoff Wolfson, a former secretary of the Zetetic Society, wrote a scathing exposé on his “old friend.”

Rowbotham’s ideas gained traction, and when he died, in 1884, his followers formed the Universal Zetetic Society.