FLAT EARTH FILES — SOURCES LIST The works and institutions named across the archive, with one line each on what the thing is and where the primary record lives. Plain text on purpose: it survives any reader and needs nothing installed. No links are given, and no citation here is invented. A URL can rot or be mistyped, so look each work up in a library catalogue, a national archive, or the institution's own list of publications. Where the archive quotes a text, the edition or translation used is named in the file doing the quoting. Where a wording has not been checked against a held copy, the file says so and paraphrases instead. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- HISTORICAL AND TEXTUAL SOURCES ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rowbotham — Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe, by Samuel Birley Rowbotham. First circulated as a pamphlet in 1849 and published as a book in 1865, with enlarged editions later in the nineteenth century. Primary record: the printed book itself; copies and scans are held by research libraries and by public digital libraries such as the Internet Archive. Editions differ, so name the edition being cited. The 1870 Wallace wager — the wager between Alfred Russel Wallace and the flat-earth advocate John Hampden, argued over the Bedford Level (Bedford Canal) in March 1870. Wallace wrote an account of the test, and the dispute produced a long exchange of pamphlets and letters. Primary record: Wallace's own published account and the contemporary pamphlet exchange. Later retellings differ from each other, so check the wording against a held copy before quoting it. Eratosthenes — the third-century BCE comparison of a noon shadow near the Tropic with one far to the north, which gave roughly a fiftieth of a circle. Primary record: the later writers who report it, including Cleomedes and Strabo; Eratosthenes' own work does not survive, so the archive cites it as reported rather than as an original text. Contemporaneous professional practice — canal, railway, aqueduct and drainage records, and the surveying manuals of the period. Primary record: national archives, canal and railway company collections, and the professional institutions that hold the surviving papers. Records of this kind are held locally as often as centrally. Bowditch — American Practical Navigator, the standard navigation text, first published 1802 and maintained since by the United States Government. Primary record: the editions published by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which also make the current edition available. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- OBSERVATIONAL AND INSTRUMENTAL SOURCES ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bradley's aberration — James Bradley's discovery of the aberration of starlight, observed 1725-1728 and published in 1728. Primary record: the 1728 volume of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, followed by his later papers on nutation. Aberration is the effect that makes a star appear displaced by about 20 arcseconds toward the direction of the earth's motion. Bessel 1838 — Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel's determination of the distance of the star 61 Cygni from its measured parallax, announced in 1838; the first reliable stellar distance by parallax. Primary record: the 1838 volume of Astronomische Nachrichten. Modern catalogues (Hipparcos, Gaia) list the same star, so the figure can be compared directly. Foucault 1851 — Léon Foucault's pendulum demonstration that a swinging pendulum appears to turn with the earth beneath it, shown in Paris in 1851. Primary record: his account in the Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences for that year; the original pendulum survives in the collection of the Musée des Arts et Métiers (Conservatoire national des arts et métiers), Paris. Michelson-Gale-Pearson 1925 — the measurement of the effect of the earth's rotation on the velocity of light, using a large ring interferometer at Clearing, Illinois. Primary record: the 1925 volume of the Astrophysical Journal, which carries the parts of the paper by Michelson, and by Gale and Pearson. The same physical effect is what modern ring-laser gyroscopes rely on, so the method has never been dropped, only miniaturised. Hipparcos and Gaia — the European Space Agency's astrometry missions. Hipparcos was launched in 1989 and its catalogue published by ESA in 1997; Gaia was launched in 2013 and its data releases are published by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium. Primary record: the mission data releases themselves and the peer-reviewed papers describing them, rather than third-party summaries. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- INSTITUTIONS AND STANDARDS ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- National Geodetic Survey (NGS), part of NOAA in the United States — defines and publishes the country's horizontal and vertical datums. Primary record: the NGS and NOAA published manuals, specifications and adjustment reports on geodetic levelling, and the national height-modernisation programme. Ordnance Survey (United Kingdom) and Geoscience Australia — the equivalent national mapping and geodetic bodies elsewhere, publishing their own datums, specifications and survey records. Primary record: each body's own publications, not the summaries. International Astronomical Union (IAU) — the body that fixes the definitions and units used in astronomy, including the astronomical unit, defined in 2012 as exactly 149,597,870,700 metres. Primary record: the IAU General Assembly resolutions and its published proceedings. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), United States — publisher of nautical and aeronautical charts and of the current Bowditch; a working reference for distances, bearings and elevations at sea. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A NOTE ON METHOD ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Every figure the archive quotes carries its origin in the file that quotes it. A figure with no source is not used, including figures that would help the archive's own case. Where a source has been cited and can no longer be found, the claim resting on it is marked unverified until it can be. The mainstream account of each observation is named and linked from the page that discusses it so a reader can check both sides from the primary documents, not from this archive's summary of them. Flat Earth Files — archive document. Not a scientific finding, and not advice of any kind.