In Darwin's Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace ...

Heretic Personality / 259
incident that, he later claimed, “cost me fifteen years of continued worry,
litigation, and persecution, with the final loss of several hundred pounds.”
Wallace confessed that the blame was entirely his: “And it was all brought
upon me by my ignorance and my own fault—ignorance of the fact so well
shown by the late Professor de Morgan—that ‘paradoxers,’ as he termed them,
can never be convinced, and my fault in consenting to get money by any kind
of wager.” Wallace later admitted that this was “the most regrettable incident
in my life.” 12
His sense of challenge piqued (and his pockets rather empty), Wallace wrote
his friend, the renowned geologist Charles Lyell, “and asked him whether he
thought I might accept it. He replied, ‘Certainly. It may stop these foolish
people to have it plainly shown them.’ ” Hampden suggested using the Old
Bedford Canal in Norfolk because it had a straight stretch of six miles between
two bridges. Wallace agreed, suggesting that John Henry Walsh, editor
of Field magazine, act as chief referee. Hampden agreed to Walsh as judge
and witness, in addition to which each man would bring along a personal
referee. Wallace was accompanied by one Dr. Coulcher, “a surgeon and amateur
astronomer.” Hampden brought with him none other than William Carpenter,
the printer of Hampden’s flat-earth literature. Walsh held the money
to be given to the winner.
On the morning of March 5, 1870, Wallace set up three objects—a telescope,
a disk, and a black band—along the six-mile stretch of the Old Bedford
Canal, eighty miles north of London, such that “if the surface of the water is
a perfectly straight line for the six miles, then the three objects...being all
exactly the same height above the water, the disc would be seen in the telescope
projected upon the black band; whereas, if the six-mile surface of the
water is convexly curved, then the top disc would appear to be decidedly
higher than the black band, the amount due to the known size of the earth.” 13
As the diagrams in Figure 10-1 show, Wallace’s experiment clearly “proved
that the curvature was very nearly of the amount calculated from the known
dimensions of the earth.” Not surprisingly, Hampden refused to even look
through the telescope, trusting to his personal referee, William Carpenter, who
claimed that he saw “the three were in a straight line, and that the earth was
flat, and he rejected the view in the large telescope as proving nothing.” Walsh,
on the other hand, as the official referee, declared Wallace the winner, and
published the results in the March 26, 1870, issue of Field. Wallace’s victory
was well deserved and he badly needed the money (throughout most of his
life Wallace was short of funds and in search of work). But Hampden
promptly wrote Walsh, “demanding his money back on the ground that the
decision was unjust, and ought to have been given in his favour.” According
to Wallace, the law in England at that time was that “all wagers are null and