Symmes’s Theory of Concentric Spheres

In 1818, something about the rings of Saturn - we don't know what, exactly - led John Cleves Symmes to conclude that the Earth was hollow. And he spent the rest of his life promoting this strange idea.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. If you've
listened to last week's episode on tear Gas, you heard
my story that I was trying to find something fun

(00:23):
to talk about and my search for something fun instead
took me to tear gas, which was not fun. It
was infuriating. Uh. My shure list at the moment just
doesn't really have like, it's got a lot of stuff
on it, but none of it is really the tone
that I was hoping for. And I did not want
to repeat that experience of going to look for something

(00:45):
fun and instead finding something not fun. So this time
I just said to myself, Okay, stop what you're doing.
What's the most absurd historical thing you can think of?
And I had this vague memory of somebody suggesting something
about some one who was trying to prove that the
earth was hollow, and I went back in our listeners

(01:05):
suggestion list. That person's name was Angela, and at some
point in the past, Angela responded to a call for
suggestions with quote that Sims Fellow from Ohio, who tried
to prove the hollow earth theory in the eighteen hundreds.
I have no recollection of exactly when Angela made that suggestion.

(01:25):
It may have been years ago, but I apparently found
that wording of the suggestions so charming that I copied
and pasted the whole thing into the spreadsheet word for word.
We're going to talk about that sims fellows ideas about
the hollow earth to day, and they were pretty wacky,
but first we need to look at some of the
work that he was building on. That work was not

(01:48):
quite so wacky, but it was also not correct. So
the idea that there is some kind of other world
or realm beneath us or contained within the Earth is
of course part of religion, mythology, and folklore all over
the world. In terms of what we were talking about today,
In the seventeenth century, scientists and philosophers in Europe started

(02:12):
theorizing that the planet was, at least to some extent, hollow,
and at first they didn't really have any data to
back this up though. They were just kind of drawing
conclusions from the existence of things like caverns and canyons
and sinkholes and volcanoes and geyser's. All of those seemed
to suggest that the planet wasn't solid all the way through.

(02:32):
There's some sound reasoning there, even if it's incorrect. I
mean sure. The first European scientists to really build a
hypothesis on this subject, and one that was based on
data more than on kind of a what if that
was astronomer and mathematician Edmund Halley. You may also hear
his name, said Haley Hall. He lived from sixteen fifty

(02:55):
six to seventeen forty two, and today he is most
famous for calculating orbit of the comet that is named
after him. He did this after realizing that comets that
had been reported in fifty one, sixteen o seven, and
six two all had remarkably similar orbits, and he suggests
that maybe instead of three different comets, they were the

(03:16):
same commet that it would be back in seventeen fifty eight.
He was right about that, although he did not live
to see it. Yeah, he has come up on the
show before, he has, and he did a lot more
than just figure out that one comment. During his lifetime,
he actually calculated the orbits of more than twenty other comments.
He developed the first life table that was based on

(03:37):
accurate data, which started the development of the field of
actuarial science. And he made a map of the world
that included the ocean's prevailing winds, which was the first
meteorological chart published in Europe. He went on a two
year voyage of the South Atlantic to chart stars that
could not be seen from the northern hemisphere. And he
studied the Earth's magnetic field extensively in Looting, taking other

(04:01):
voyages to measure magnetic declination, or the difference between the
magnetic and geographic north Poles. In addition to all of
that and other stuff that we did not even mention
Edmund Halley was a huge part of getting Isaac Newton's
groundbreaking work Princecipia Mathematica written and printed. We talked about

(04:21):
that in our previous episode on Newton, as well as
in our previous episode on Samuel Peep's Who Was That
Works in Perimeter. Hallie encouraged Newton to write it and
then halle edited it, corrected the proofs, wrote a preface,
and paid for the printing. He also mediated various conflicts
and rivalries within the Royal Society, many of whose members

(04:44):
had also been working on, trying to answer some of
the same questions on planetary motion that Newton addressed. In
this work, Hallie's hypothesis about the Earth being hollow pulled
together multiple parts of his work. One piece was his
study of the Earth's magnetic field. Old it had become clear,
for reasons that nobody really understood that the Earth's magnetic

(05:05):
poles moved around, and that the planet's magnetic field shifted
in a way that seemed erratic. Having studied all this data,
Hallie concluded quote that the globe of the Earth must
be supposed to be one great magnet, having four magnetic
poles or points of attraction near each pole of the equator,
to that in those parts of the world which lie

(05:26):
near adjacent to any one of those magnetic poles, the
needles is chiefly governed, thereby the nearest pole always being
always more prominent over the more remote. So the problem
with this conclusion, which Hallie knew, was that quote no
magnet I have ever seen or heard of had more
than two opposite poles, whereas the Earth had visibly four

(05:50):
and perhaps more. Also, Hallie had never seen or heard
of a magnet whose poles shifted around and yet the
Earth's four poles and perhaps even more of them, did
seem to wander. How he found his solution to these
problems through his work with Newton and the Principia Mathematica.
In it, Newton describes the Moon as being far more

(06:12):
dense than the Earth, and he had come to this
conclusion by comparing the Sun's and the Moon's effects on
tides and factoring in the idea that the Sun was
about a quarter as dense as the Earth. In Hallie's words,
quote Sir Isaac Newton has demonstrated the Moon to be
more solid than our earth as nine to five, which
may we not then suppose for ninths of our globe

(06:34):
to be cavity. So Newton's calculations here we're just not correct.
This specific error has been described as possibly the most
glaring one in the entire prince Shipia Mathematica. But Hallie
was working with what he had, and he came to
the conclusion that the Earth was made up of four concentric,

(06:56):
nested layers with space in between them. He described them
as quote subterraneous orbs capable of being inhabited, although he
didn't really know exactly what type of life they might support.
These inner worlds, he thought, were about the sizes of Venus, Mars,
and Mercury. They were each held in place by gravity,

(07:16):
they all rotated on their own axes, and at least
some of them had their own magnetic polls. So all
of those variations that Hallie and others had seen in
the wandering around of the magnetic north pole and the
shifts and irregularities of the Earth's magnetic field were because
of the movement of the polls of those inner layers.

(07:37):
Hallie presented these ideas to the Royal Society in sixteen one,
and in sixteen nine two he published an account of
the cause of the change of the variation of the
magnetical needle with an hypothesis of the structure of the
internal parts of the Earth, and he published that in
Philosophical Transactions. Hallie thought this nesting doll version of the

(07:58):
Earth could explain some other phenomena as well. For example,
for these inner worlds to be habitable, as he thought
they were, they would need to have light. That was
something he thought might come from some kind of luminous
material within. If some of that luminous material escaped through
cracks in the Earth's outer shell that could explain the

(08:19):
Aurora borealis. He also noted the rings of Saturn, which
were at the time believed to be solid and separated
by gaps. He noted that as an example of a
similar concentric system that people already knew about. And halle
seems to have understood that this whole idea was a
little bit fanciful, and in one writing he noted that

(08:40):
readers should quote lay no more stress upon this conceit
than it will bear. But he also seemed to be
really rather fond of this hypothesis. In his last official portrait,
painted by Michael Doll in seventy six, Hallie is holding
a reproduction of the nested Earth diagram that had been
printed in philosophical transactions. In so, while Hallie's ideas about

(09:05):
the structure of the Earth's weren't correct, they were based
on data. John Cleave Sims, on the other hand, had
his own ideas, and they came from nobody is quite
sure where. We'll have more on that after a sponsor break.

(09:26):
Edmund Hallie's hollow Earth hypothesis reminds me a little bit
of our previous episode on Alfred began Er and his
ideas on continental drift Beganer's conclusion was pretty close to right,
but he did not really have a solid explanation for
why it was to back that up. Hallie, on the
other hand, did some solid work on the analysis and

(09:49):
the explanation, although it did rest on Newton's incorrect calculation
of the Earth's density. Hall He's conclusions, on the other hand,
were wrong. Hallie's work on this, though, did find some support.
For example, Puritan Minister Cotton, mother of Massachusetts Bay Colony,
repeated Hallie's ideas in The Christian Philosopher in seventy nine.

(10:11):
Eighteenth century Swiss mathematician leon Ard Euler proposed his own
variation on it, suggesting that the Earth was hollow with
a son at the center and that the planet's interior
might have its own civilization. Similarly, Scottish physicist and mathematicians
Sir John Leslie suggested that the Earth was hollow with
two sons inside. I love this sort of fanciful one upmanship, right, like, yeah,

(10:36):
you're onto something, but it's really two sons, two of them.
And then there was John Cleves Sims. Sometimes he has
called John Cleves Simms junior to distinguish him from his
uncle and namesake, the Elder John both fought in and
helped finance the Revolutionary War. He's also served as a

(10:57):
delegate to the Continental Congress. He bought a large tract
of land in the Northwest Territory from the government, and
that was known as the Simms Purchase or the Miami Purchase.
One of the settlements there eventually became the city of Cincinnati.
This purchase, though, also led the government to change how
it dealt with this kind of land deal because the

(11:18):
elder John Simms sold land that he did not actually own,
and the buyers had to re buy it from the
government if they wanted to keep it. This was part
of what led to Alexander Hamilton's creation of the Office
of the Surveyor General in seventeen ninety. Like his brother,
Timothy Simms had also fought in the Revolutionary War. Afterward,

(11:39):
he became judge of the Court of Common Pleas in
Sussex County, New Jersey, and he married a woman named
Mercy Harker, and one of their children was the younger
John Cleave Simms, who was born on November five, sight.
Not a whole lot is known about the younger John's
early life or his education, although in the words of
his son Americus, he had quote a good Common English education,

(12:03):
which in after life he greatly improved through his grate
fondness for reading and an insatiable desire for knowledge. This
younger John Cleaves Sims entered the U. S. Army as
an ensign on March eighteen o two, and he started
working his way up through the ranks. In eighteen oh seven,
he was injured in a duel with a fellow officer.

(12:26):
This was over a kind of petty dispute that stretched
back to an altercation with a different officer over compensation
during that second officer's furlough. I'd read a whole account
of this that he wrote in a letter, and I
was like, man, this is just annoying and hard to follow,
and y'all probably could have cleared it up about dueling. Uh.

(12:49):
Sims was struck in the wrist in this duel. He
never recovered his full range of motion. Afterward he did, apparently,
though later become friends with his opponent. Talking it out
would never work um. In eighteen o eight, Sims married
Mrs Mary Anne Pellettier Lockwood, who was the widow of
another fellow officer, Captain Benjamin Lockwood. Mary Anne already had

(13:13):
six children, and she and John had four more together.
By eighteen twelve, Sims had been promoted to captain. He
served in the War of eighteen twelve before being given
an honorable discharge in eighteen fifteen. From there, he and
his family moved to St. Louis, where he worked as
a trader, both with the military outposts along the Mississippi

(13:33):
River and with the indigenous people of the area. We
really don't have a lot of detail about exactly what
he traded or what his relationships were like with all
the people involved. Like that entire topic can be very fraught,
and I just don't have any information. Then, in a
letter to a stepson that was written in eighteen seventeen,
Simms mentioned that because of the curious formation of Saturn

(13:55):
and its rings, he thought that all planets and globes
were hollow. He did not explain in this letter how
exactly he came to that conclusion based on that information,
did not say what it was about the rings of
Saturn that led to his conclusion that the Earth was hollow,
to be specific, But in eighteen eighteen Sims published an

(14:17):
announcement on this subject. It began quote light gives light
to light discover ad infinitum St. Louis, Missouri, Territory, North America,
April tenth a d eighteen and then, in all capital
letters to all the world exclamation point, I declare the
Earth is hollow and habitable within, containing a number of

(14:41):
solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and is open
at the polls twelve or sixteen degrees. I pledged my
life in support of this truth, and am ready to
explore the hollow if the world will support and aid
me in the undertaking. John Cleves Sims of Ohio, late
Captain of Infantry. This makes me wonder what sort of

(15:04):
grand announcement I would put under all caps to all
the world. Uh. And then came the notation nb or
nota ben a, which means take note. Quote I have
read for the press a treatise on the principles of
the matter, wherein I show proofs of the above positions,
account for the phenomena, and disclosed Dr Darwin's golden secret.

(15:27):
My terms are the patronage of this and new worlds.
I dedicate to my wife and ten children. I select
Dr s. L. Mitchell, Sir h. Davy, and Baron alex
To Humboldt as my protectors. I ask one hundred brave companions,
well equipped to start from Siberia in the fall season

(15:47):
with reindeer and slays on the ice of the frozen sea.
I engage. We will find warm and rich land stocked
with thrifty vegetables and animals, if not men, on reaching
one degree northward of latitude eight two, we will return
in the succeeding spring. J. C. S. My favorite part

(16:08):
of the passage that Holly just read, which is not
evident to listening, is that slays with reindeer and slaves
is spelled s l A y s, which just makes
me think of like bipedal reindeer armed with knives in
their front hoofs. Is that not how reindeer normally stroll about?

(16:29):
Or no, I mean they should? Um So a note
on these uh these names that he drops as his protectors.
These were Dr Samuel Latham Mitchell, Sir Humphrey Davy, and
Alexander von Humboldt. All three of these were SIMS contemporaries,
and for just a glimpse of each of their work,

(16:51):
Mitchell was a doctor and a naturalist who conducted geological
surveys and founded the New York Academy of Sciences. Davy
was a kid miss who discovered several elements and invented
a miner's safety lamp. There are actually some references to
that lamp and Sim's other work. Von Hombolt was a
naturalist and a polymath who undertook a scientific expedition to

(17:14):
South America and in the years after the events that
we're talking about here, published Cosmos, a sketch of a
physical description of the universe. We should also note that
the idea that the Earth was open somehow at the
polls was not new, just the opposite. In terms of
European thought, it goes back at least to the sixteenth century.

(17:34):
Gerardis Mercator, for example, promoted the idea that the Earth's
waters entered the globe through the north pole and then
passed through the center and were expelled from the South pole.
He wrote about this in fifteen sixty nine, the same
year that he made the map projection that really distorts
the sizes of things the farther you get from the equator.
But that also pretty much became the standard map for

(17:57):
both classrooms and navigation. It is not or if Mercator's writing,
or this sixteenth century line of thought in general, may
have informed Sims's ideas, though okay, he just never really
said where that idea came from. I also didn't realize
that the Mercator projection of maps was quite that old.
Sims printed five hundred copies of this announcement, and in

(18:21):
some accounts, when he sent it out it was accompanied
by a certificate that proclaimed him to be sane. I
feel like, when you send out your announcement and you
also have to get a sanity certificate, like maybe you
should just just three check all your data. Yeah, yeah,
in the words of his son Americus. He sent it

(18:43):
quote to every learned institution and to every considerable town
and village, as well as to numerous distinguished individuals throughout
the United States, and sent several to the learned societies
of Europe. Sims also published a series of what he
called memoirs in a Cincinnati newspaper that was called The

(19:03):
Western Spy. These detailed all kinds of phenomena that he
saw as proof of his ideas. These included visible circles
around the polls of Mars, the rings of Saturn, the
phases of Venus, the belts of Jupiter, and the way
iron filings makes circles under paper sometimes if you put
a magnet under there. So again, in his son's words,

(19:25):
Sims's message was quote overwhelmed with ridicule, as the production
of a distempered imagination. It was for many years a
fruitful source of jest with the newspapers. Sources of ridicule
included two of the three protectors that he named, Humboldt
and Davy. Each dismissed sims This hypothesis entirely. But Mitchell,

(19:47):
who was described as being in general very generous with
his time and energy with scientific and curious people, sent
Sims a letter saying that he deserved quote great credit
for ingenuity and originality, while also stressing in that letter
that Sims's idea was a hypothesis and that hypotheses could
be correct or incorrect. In his reply, Mitchell also included

(20:12):
some other examples of hollow things from nature, and he
helped Sims out in the years that followed, making introductions
and generally opening doors for him in his traveling and lecturing.
So I've read this letter and the tone of it
came off to me as like the patient indulgence that
someone might respond to a letter from a child. Um.

(20:39):
I can't really say whether he thought he was corresponding
with a child. Uh. You know that that announcement did
mention that Sims had been in the army, But uh,
I have this imagined scenario in my head where like
he thought he was writing to an eight year old
and then met a grown man. But that's probably just

(21:01):
me making things up. Um. We will talk about where
things went after this whole announcement was distributed after a
quick sponsor break, Apparently life as a trader in St.
Louis didn't really work out for John Kleep Sims. He

(21:21):
and his family moved to Newport, Kentucky in eighteen nineteen,
and that same year the book Simsonia, A Voyage of
Discovery was published under the pseudonym of Captain Adams Seaborn.
This is a fictional travelog that details of voyage in
which Seaborn meets a society of people living within a

(21:41):
hollow earth. It is sometimes described as the first American
work of utopian fiction. Makes several direct references to Sims
and his theories and There are two competing interpretations for
this book. Either it is an absolutely complete, the earnest
book that was written by John Cleaves Sims to promote

(22:04):
his ideas, or it is a satire that somebody did
to make fun of him. I have not read the
whole book, but I did read part of it before
recording this podcast, and I read papers arguing each of
these points of view, and honestly, I do not know.
I am a cynical person, and there's part of me
when this gets introduced that thinks he's just an epic

(22:26):
flam flam man. But that's again probably just me making
things up. In eighteen and eighteen twenty three, Sims petitioned
Congress for funding for a polar expedition that he hoped
would prove him right. He also gave lectures to drum
up support in Newark, Ohio. In eighteen twenty three, he
encountered an expedition headed by Major Stephen Long. Expedition geographer

(22:50):
William Keating wrote down some very strong opinions about Sims,
calling him quote a man whose eccentric views on the
nature of the globe have acquired for him not only
in America but also in England a temporary reputation. The
partial insanity of this man is of a singular nature.
It has caused him to pervert to the support of

(23:12):
an evidently absurd doctrine. All the facts which by close
study he has been enabled to collect from a vast
number of authorities. He appears conversant with every work of
travels from Herns to Humboldts, and there is not a
fact to be found in these which he does not
manage with considerable ingenuity to bring to the support of
his favorite doctrine. On the other hand, Sims apparently got

(23:35):
along quite well with Major Long. Two of them became friends,
and that just seemed to be a pattern with him.
People either found sims ideas to be totally ridiculous and
questioned whether he was in his right mind, or they
found him just so affable and earnest that they became
friends and even supporters of his ideas. In eight four,

(23:57):
the Simms family moved again, this time to Hamilton o'hi io,
to a farm that he had inherited from his uncle.
That same year, Sims went on tour with his stepson
Anthony Lockwood and supporter Jeremiah and Reynolds Simms and Reynolds
parted ways pretty quickly, though essentially Reynolds thought he might
have better success getting an expedition together on his own,

(24:19):
and he was more interested in going to the South
Pole than the North Pole. Sim's got approval to join
a Russian polar expedition in eighteen five. He could not
afford to go. Yeah, he was making like a little
money through donations and things on these tours, and it
was barely enough to cover expenses and not enough for
anything else. A book detailing sims theories came out in

(24:41):
eighteen twenty six. It is entitled Sims Theory of Concentric Spears,
demonstrating that the Earth is hollow, habitable within, and widely
open about the polls by a citizen of the United States.
This book was really written by another of Sim's supporters,
James McBride, who hoped that the proceeds from the book

(25:01):
might fund an expedition. If you go looking for this
book and you search it by the title, you may
find another book that has the exact same name, although
it is not by a citizen of the United States.
This second book is by John's son Americus. It came
out in eighteen seventy eight. In addition to having an
identical title, some of the content of this later book

(25:23):
is also identical. That's reportedly because by eighteen seventy eight,
McBride's book was no longer in print and there weren't
many copies left, so Americas Sims just copied a lot
of it himself into his own book. I like that
the laws around such things were a lot looser. People
were way more chill about about things being plagiarized them.

(25:46):
I didn't know, Like I didn't. It was in the
order of things that I in the order that I
read things. It was like another one of Sim's sons
who was like, yeah, my brother copied this book because
this other book was out of print and there weren't
many more copies. And like, I came at that information
very late in the game, after I had already read

(26:06):
McBride's entire book, and I had started reading America Sims's book,
and I got to this part where I was like,
I've read this before. Um, And my mind had already
been so bent by reading so much of the part
that was not identical that I was like, have I
read this before? In the words of McBride's book quote,

(26:30):
According to Sims's theory, the Earth, as well as all
the celestial orbicular bodies existing in the universe, visible and invisible,
which partake in any degree of a planetary nature, from
the greatest to the smallest, from the Sun down to
the most minute blazing meteor or falling star, are all
constituted in a greater or less degree of a collection

(26:52):
of spheres more or less solid, concentric with each other,
and more or less open at their polls, each sphere
being separated from its adjoining compeers by space replete with
aerial fluids. So yeah, not only was the Earth this
kind of nesting doll with open polls, so was everything
else that was roughly shaped like a planet. This book

(27:15):
went on to say, quote, the planet which has been
designated the Earth, is composed of at least five hollow,
concentric spheres, with spaces between each, an atmosphere surrounding each
in habitable as well on the concave as the convex surface.
Each of these spheres are widely open at their poles.
The north polar opening of the sphere we inhabit is

(27:38):
believed to be about four thousand miles in diameter and
the southern above six thousand. In addition to the spaces
between the nested spheres, Sims also thought that quote each
sphere has an intermediate cavity or midplane space of considerable
extent situated between the convex and concave surfaces of the sphere,

(28:00):
filled with a very light and elastic fluid rarefied in
proportion to the gravity or condensing power of the exposed
surfaces of the respective spheres, And also various other less
cavities or spaces between the larger or principal one and
the outer and inner surfaces of the spheres, each filled
with a similar fluid or gas, most probably partaking much

(28:23):
of the nature of hydrogen, so unlike in Edmund Halley's model,
which is mentioned repeatedly in McBride's book, so that's clearly
something that SAMs did know about. Sam's thought that these
inner layers of the planet were illuminated not by luminous
material but by the same sun as the exterior. He
described the edges of these circular openings at the poles

(28:47):
as verges, and he wrote that they were angled in
such a way that the Sun's reflections off of polar
ice could reach very deep down into the interior, and
he outlined where on the globe these verges were in
places they overlapped parts of the world that had been
mapped or were inhabited, apparently without anyone noticing that they
were really inside and opening into the planet. Sims also

(29:10):
suggested these interior nested worlds had their own weather systems
brought on by water and wind being sucked in through
one pole and expelled out the other. As we said earlier,
it's really unclear exactly how Sims came up with any
of this, like whether it was just his own imaginative
flight of fancy, or whether he had based it on

(29:32):
some kind of specific information. The surviving summaries of what
he was talking about are not really based on data
or measurements, but they do use Sim's ideas to try
to explain a lot of other phenomena or to use
other phenomena to back up his ideas. So, for example,
the Magellanic clouds as described in Americas Sims's book, they

(29:56):
are due to the quote great refractive power of the
atmosphere about the polar openings causing the opposite side of
the verge to appear pictured in the sky. To be clear,
the imagellantic clouds are really galaxies that are visible in
the southern hemisphere. Uh. He also used meteors and meteorites

(30:17):
in this way. McBride's book explains sims opinion on meteors
as being sort of spontaneously accumulated in space as hollow spheres.
It then talks about several specific recovered meteorites as proof,
For example, one scene in Connecticut in eighteen o seven
which broke apart in three stages. Some of the recovered

(30:38):
pieces were concave and some were convex, and Sims concluded
that the meteorite had originally been made up of three
concentric spheres, like a miniature version of his model of
the Earth. Sims also pulled in all kinds of other
phenomena that we're not planetary bodies or objects from space

(30:58):
as evidence of what he was talking about, like sun spots,
which that is in space. Maybe sun spots are the
Sun's versions of the holes in the Earth's poles. Also,
have you noticed that stalks of wheat and bird feathers
and the large bones of animals are hollow You thought
maybe that backed up his ideas also migratory fish and

(31:19):
other animals that overwinter in the Arctic. Maybe they were
really over wintering in a temperate zone within the interior
of the earth. So like, for example, musk oxen, weren't
just migrating to where it was less snowy to survive
the winter. They were really going somewhere warm and balmy
and secretly hanging out there and then returning back to

(31:41):
the colder parts of the Earth in the spring. Although
simms first announcement of his theory seems to have been
almost universally laughed at, he did develop something of a
following during his lecture tours. His last tour made its
way into Canada in seven, but the cold weather worsened
his existing health issues, something that one of his sons

(32:03):
described as an aggravated case of dyspepsia brought on by
eating bad food while he was in the army. He
went back to New York and then recovered with relatives
in New Jersey until he was well enough to travel
back home to Ohio. He died there at home in
Ohio on May nine, at the age of just forty eight.

(32:23):
One of his sons erected a monument at his grave site,
which is an inscribed obelisk with a hollow sphere on top.
Simms was pretty deeply in debt when he died, although
most of his creditors were family members. His eldest son, Americus,
the same one who wrote that book, was only sixteen
at that time. He took over the farm. He sold
some of the Famili's land to get them on better

(32:45):
financial footing. It does seem like they pulled themselves out
of the financial situation they were in. In spite of
all of this, it seems as though at least some
or maybe even all of his family were really genuinely
devoted to him. In addition into America Simms's book, another
of John's children, Elmore Simms, also wrote an account of

(33:05):
his life and work, which was published in three parts
in the magazine Southern Bivouac in eighteen eighty seven. As
for Jeremiah Reynolds, he kept trying to get funding for
a polar expedition, including meeting with President John Quincy Adams
in eight This did not work out, and he turned
to the private sector, and he wound up stuck in

(33:26):
Chile after a mutiny in eighteen twenty nine. While he
was there he heard a story about a white whale,
which led him to write Mocha Dick, or the White
Whale of the Pacific, one of the inspirations for Herman
Melville's Moby Dick. Finally, Reynolds was part of the Great
United States Exploring Expedition or the x X, which could

(33:47):
be its own episode. At some point they did not
find evidence of Simms holes, but many of the specimens
they returned with helped build the collections at the newly
established Smithsonian Institution. Yeah. That, Uh, that expedition as a
whole story separate from this. Obviously, reynolds expeditions and Sim's

(34:09):
theories also helped inspire Edgar Allan Poe's only complete novel,
which is narrative of Arthur Gordon pim of Nantucket and
Sim's really heavy promotion of this idea of the Earth
being hollow and something that was inhabitable that you could
travel into. That helped make strange worlds in the Earth's
interior a common setting for works of science fiction and

(34:31):
fantasy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Uh
lovecraftoes him a debt of gratitude. Today our knowledge of
the interior structure of the Earth comes from the study
of seismic waves. In six Danish seismologist INGA. Lehman published
work describing an inner core and outer core and a
mantle beneath the Earth's crust. The prevailing theory for the

(34:54):
Earth's magnetic field and its variance is that it comes
from the dynamo effect, which is the result of fluid
mo shan in the Earth's outer core. Ingaliman also seems
to have a really interesting work. I was thinking about
whether to try to do an episode on her as well,
but at a glance I was not able to find
quite enough information. So She'll be on like my future

(35:17):
list to try to gather more info on over time.
That sounds good to me. Yeah, that is John Cleave
sims um Is ideas were just kind of wacky, I mean,
wonderfully imaginative. That's also true. I want to I want
to celebrate the good at the moment. Uh, do you

(35:39):
have good listener mail to celebrate? I do. This is
from Lena, and I answered this email, but I also
thought that other folks listening to the show might be
interested as well. Lena wrote in to say hi, Holly
and Tracy, Thank you so much for your informative podcast.
I've been listening for years, and this is my first
time writing in thank you for introducing tumon Bay a

(36:00):
couple of months ago. I've enjoying it as well. Listening
to tumon Bay and some of your shows that deal
with the history of slavery got me thinking, how did
the idea of slavery first come about? I understand that
chattel slavery in the US and other settler colonies was
the most extreme and ugly manifestation of the practice, but
I also know that slavery is thousands of years old.

(36:20):
Without it being an accepted practice in the first place,
the Atlantic slave trade couldn't have come about. I vaguely
understand that slavery originated with the victors of war making
prisoners of war work for them, but I wonder how
it became a widespread, accepted practice. It still seems like
a huge moral jump from forcing prisoners of war to
work to families casually owning, buying, and selling their household

(36:44):
staff as property, and farmers owning the workers in their fields.
Would you consider doing an episode about the history of
how the concept of slavery came about and became widely accepted.
How did humans decide it was okay to own other humans?
Thank you again for all you you best wishes, Lena,
So thank you so much, Lena for this email. I

(37:04):
did answer it, and the basic answer that I gave
is like, I'm not sure if the question of where
slavery originally came from as really answerable since it's been
present in some form for so many societies around the world,
probably going back to before there was written record of
anything to go back to. But there are two other

(37:25):
podcasts that have looked at this whole question. It's way
more than one episode worth of stuff. Um So the
one that I mentioned when I wrote back to Lena
was uh Slate's History of American Slavery podcast, which used
to be available only for Slate Plus subscribers but now
is available to anybody. It is hosted by Jamal Bowie

(37:47):
and Rebecca Onion, and it looks step by step at
this evolution of slavery, specifically in the United States, and
how it went from something that looked more like the
way slavery has been practiced in lots of other parts
of the world, um to something that became like the
hereditary racial or race based uh slavery that we have

(38:12):
talked to so much about on the show. UM. The
other one is a season of the podcast seen on radio,
and that season is called Seeing White. I feel like
it's the second season of that show, but I might
be wrong. That is hosted by John Bwen and Sinderi Kumunika,
and it looks at the idea of of like white

(38:36):
people and how that idea evolved, and especially the earlier
episodes talk about that a lot in the way that
slavery transformed and like how in a lot of ways
these racist ideas were created to support the institution of slavery. UM.
So both of those podcasts are excellent. I highly recommend

(39:00):
them to everyone. They like. They to me work really
well together along with also uh like the podcast also
has some of the same information, UM, but all of
it is like different angles on the same h the
same stuff, and so all of that I think is
is absolutely worth a listen. So thank you so much

(39:22):
for that question. UH. Those other podcasts again are all great. UM.
They should all be available on any podcast platform that
you like. If you would like to write to us
about this or any other podcast, or at history podcast
at i heart radio dot com. And then we're all
over social media at missed in History and that's where
you'll find our Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest, Instagram, and

(39:45):
you can subscribe to our show on the I heart
radio app and Apple podcasts and anywhere else to get
your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H