If the earth is a globe, and is 25,000 English statute miles in circumference, the surface of all standing water must have a certain degree of convexity-every part must be an arc of a circle. This makes it an ideal location to directly measure the curvature of the Earth, as Rowbotham wrote in Zetetic Astronomy: The Bedford Level Īt the point chosen for all the experiments, the river is a slow-flowing drainage canal running in an uninterrupted straight line for a 6-mile (10 km) stretch to the north-east of the village of Welney. However, in 1870, after adjusting Rowbotham's method to allow for the effects of atmospheric refraction, Alfred Russel Wallace found a curvature consistent with a spherical Earth. Samuel Birley Rowbotham, who conducted the first observations starting in 1838, claimed that he had proven the Earth to be flat.
The Bedford Level experiment was a series of observations carried out along a 6-mile (10 km) length of the Old Bedford River on the Bedford Level of the Cambridgeshire Fens in the United Kingdom during the 19th and early 20th centuries to measure the curvature of the Earth.
The Old Bedford River, photographed from the bridge at Welney, Norfolk (2008) the camera is looking downstream, south-west of the bridge Experiment to determine the shape of the Earth
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