t about the same time a new theory about the hollow Earth was put forward by
Cyrus Read. Teed states that the Earth was indeed a hollow sphere and that people lived on the
inside surface of it. In the center of the sphere was a sun, as purposed by Euler, but this internal sun was
only half luminous with the remainder dark, in the manner of the Moon's surface.
As the internal sun rotates it gave the appearance of a sunset and sunrise as the luminous area
is exposed to a succession of regions of the inner surface in turn.
The dense atmosphere contained within the sphere prevented observers from looking up into
the sky and seeing the features of the other side of the world. Teed suggested that Seaborn's
observation were of the unlit side of this inner sun.
ith growing interest in China among western scholars in the 1840s and 1850s, word of historic records
claiming that Chinese explorers had often visited a kingdom within the Earth. Then during the
turmoil of Taiping Rebellion and the infusion of westerners in china as participants in the conflict,
letters reporting interviews with China men who claimed to have personalty journey to this
kingdom within the Earth arrived in the great universities of Europe. Soon western scholar were
a buzz with the possibilities of entirely unexplored regions within the Earth.
The means to examine the possibilities of these new realms seemed to be beyond the reach of modern science. Expedition by sea to the Arctic and Antarctic had all met with failure as they were unable to navigate past the walls of ice encountered. Even the deepest excavations into the Earth did not even begin to approach the expected 500 to 600 mile thick crust of the Earth. Robert Mallet, the famed Irish seismologist reported that his studies of the propagation of sound waves through the solid crust of the Earth could, in principle, probe even these expected depths. However the explosives needed to generate sufficiently powerful waves to reach the proposed 500 to 600 mile depth of the interior soil air interface and return to his instruments with a detectable strength were not yet practical. In 1854 Luigi Palmieri of Italy revealed his latest advanced in the study of seismic waves in the form of the electromagnetic seismograph. In collaborations with Mallet and Alexis Peurey of France, Palmieri attempted to demonstrate the presence of the internal cavity.
espite the previous reports of the inner kingdom
among the Taiping rebels, all attempts of expeditions to locate the passage to the reported
land were thwarted by the civil unrest and military action of the time.
