by NATALIE WOLCHOVER
Map of the Earth made in 1893 by Orlando Ferguson of Hot Springs, South Dakota. IMAGE/Don Homuth
In 1893, Orlando Ferguson, a real estate developer based in South Dakota, drew a map of the Earth that combined biblical and scientific knowledge in a unique way. The map accompanied a 92-page lecture that Ferguson — referring to himself as a “professor” — delivered in town after town, traveling far and wide to share his theory of geography, highlighted by his belief that the Earth was flat.
Ferguson’s map represents the Earth as a giant, rectangular slab with a dimpled upper surface. Don Homuth of Salem, Ore., just donated one of two intact copies of the map to the Library of Congress. [See the map]
“It’s very fragile. It’s printed on tissue paper and hand-colored with watercolors,” Homuth said. He got the map from his eighth grade history teacher in Fargo, N.D., who got it from his grandfather, who lived in Hot Springs, S.D. — Ferguson’s hometown.
“Now, I’m 67. I don’t want it to fall into the hands of relatives, for God’s sake! And I don’t particularly want to sell it. So we thought we’d send it to the Library of Congress,” Homuth told Life’s Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience.
The only other copy is housed in the Pioneer Historical Museum in Hot Springs. James Bingham, chairman of the museum’s board of directors, told us what he knows about it.
“Ferguson was trying to make an updated version of the flat Earth theory to fit the biblical description of the Earth with known facts,” Bingham said. Typical of flat Earths, Ferguson’s Earth is a rectangular slab, the four corners of which are each guarded by an angel. “What makes his flat Earth different from other theories is his theory holds that the Earth is imprinted with an ‘inverse toroid.'” If you were to take a donut and press it into wet cement and then remove the donut, Bingham explained, the rounded impression it left in the cement would be what is known in mathematics as an inverse toroid.
LS for more