Samuel Birley Rowbotham (; 1816 – 23 December 1884, in London) was an English inventor, writer, utopian socialist, quack doctor and flat Earther who wrote Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe under the pseudonym Parallax. His work was originally published as a 16-page pamphlet (1849), and later expanded into a book (1865). Rowbotham's method, which he called zetetic astronomy, models the Earth as a flat disc centered at the North Pole and bounded along its perimeter by a wall of ice, with the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars moving only several thousand miles above its surface. Rowbotham's work is generally credited with the modern revival of belief in a flat Earth.
Early life Samuel Birley Rowbotham was born in 1816 in Stockport. His father was a merchant from a prominent local family, and his mother hailed from a wealthy family of industrialists. According to a likely self-aggrandized autobiographical account published in 1872, Rowbotham had begun to question the theories of Isaac Newton at the age of 7, and had been expelled from school after having snuck out of a astronomy lecture with a friend. He was sent to live with his grandfather, who introduced him to astronomy to a skeptical Rowbotham, who vowed to one day disprove the established wisdom about the universe. In his younger years, he vacilitated in ideology between strict Biblical literalism and the utopian socialist teachings of Robert Owen, becoming an itinerant lecturer on various socialist and scientific topics. In 1842, Rowbotham, under the pseudonym Tryon, published his first pamphlet, An Inquiry into the Cause of Natural Death, which was published in book form by the socialist publisher Abel Heywood in 1845. In it, he proposed that aging and death were the result of "earthly matter", namely phosphate and sulphate of lime, building up within the body. By avoiding foods containing such earthly matter, including salt and wheat bread (nicknamed the "Staff of Death" by Rowbotham) and eating plenty of fruits, vegetables, and meat, one could halt the aging process and become almost immortal. Despite holding no medical credentials of any kind, Rowbotham in his 1842 pamphlet claimed to have personally cured 320 patients with a 100% success rate of various ailments, including heart palpitations, rheumatism and paralysis, using a combination of "Tartaric, Hydro-chloric, and Nitric acids". This claim was dropped in the 1845 book version, which replaced it with support for the health and longevity benefits of "free phosporous", contained within phosphoric acid. Taking phosphoric acid would also combat the use alcohol and opium as well as sexual desire, while simultaneously restoring one's sexual virility.
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