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What Lincoln’s Pockets Held When he Died and Other Presidential Oddities

Khalid Elhassan July 15, 2021 36 min

Secret Service agents bust counterfeiters in 1879. United States Secret Service

President John Quincy Adams believed in the Hollow Earth Theory — The hollow earth, as envisioned by Symnes. Wikimedia

4. The Newton of the West

The Hollow Earth Theory was concocted by a charlatan named John Cleves Symmes, Jr., a veteran of the War of 1812. He moved to the frontier, where he reinvented himself as a scientist and became known as the “Newton of the West”. In 1818 he published Symmes Circular No. 1, in which he wrote: “I declare the earth is hollow, and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentrick spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles 12 or 16 degrees; I pledge 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“.

Each concentric circle supposedly contained a subterranean world, all of them heated and illuminated by a sun-like object at the Earth’s center. Symmes then hit the lecture circuit, and lobbied the government for an expedition to the poles, where he claimed the openings to the hollow earth’s interior were located. Educated people scoffed, but many, including John Quincy Adams, took it seriously. Indeed, he promised to back an expedition to explore the hollow earth during his successful 1824 presidential campaign.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.