The Story Behind Gleason’s Flat Earth Map (1892): Faith, Science, and Design
- ADVENTURE iDIAZ
- May 29
- 11 min read
Updated: Dec 8
Researched, restored, and written by ADVENTURE iDIAZ — honoring the timeless link between faith, design, and cartographic history.
The winter of 1892 settled heavy over Buffalo, New York. Iron wheels groaned on snowy rails, telegraph wires hissed with static, and in a cramped workshop near North Division Street, a machinist named Alexander Gleason leaned over the drafting table that would hold his universe.
He wasn’t drawing a globe. He was drawing a circle — a calm, level world with the North Pole at its heart, continents spreading outward like petals, oceans bound by a frozen rim. Around the edge he etched the twenty-four hours of the day, so the whole creation turned like a clock.
He called it “The New Standard Map of the World — scientifically and practically correct, as it is.” The rest of the century came to know it simply as Gleason’s Flat Earth Map.
The Machinist Who Drew Creation
Alexander Gleason: The Man Behind the Biblical Earth Map
Alexander Gleason never fit the stereotype of a cloistered theologian. He lived in the world of machines and measurements, of metal filings and drafting tables. City records and later historical summaries describe him as a machinist, pattern-maker, and civil engineer living in Buffalo, New York — the kind of man who spent his days solving practical problems with precise lines and numbers.
By the late 19th century, Buffalo was booming: lake steamers crowded the harbor, grain elevators lined the waterfront, and the Erie Canal’s traffic pulsed through the city. Gleason lived right inside that mechanical heartbeat. He worked closely enough with printers and engravers that when the time came to publish his ideas, he partnered with the Buffalo Electrotype and Engraving Company — the firm credited on both his 1892 map and the second edition of his book.
Spiritually, Gleason was part of an Adventist current that treated Scripture as literal description. Historian Robert Schadewald later called him “the most important Seventh-day Adventist flat-earther” in the United States. Where others saw a divide between faith and science, Gleason felt tension — but also opportunity. If God had created an ordered world, then that order, he believed, ought to be measurable.
In 1890, he printed the first edition of Is the Bible from Heaven? Is the Earth a Globe? — a modest 95-page softcover. Two years later he followed with his four-color flat earth map, and in 1893 he released an expanded 402-page second edition of the book, packed with diagrams, extended arguments, and accounts of his own experiments on the still waters of the Erie Canal. Those tests, he claimed, confirmed exactly what his theology already told him: the water lay flat.
So by the time Gleason sat down to engrave his map, he wasn’t starting from a blank slate. He was a seasoned mechanic, an Adventist public intellectual, and a man who had already tried to test the world with both Scripture and surveyor’s eye. The 1892 sheet wasn’t a whim — it was the visual culmination of a long argument he had been building in ink, in lectures, and along the canal banks of upstate New York.
Designing Gleason’s Flat Earth Map: The 1892 Azimuthal Equidistant Projection
The Circle That Stood Still
Unfold Gleason’s print and your eye is drawn first to the shape. It’s a north-polar Azimuthal Equidistant Map:
The North Pole sits calmly at the center.
Meridians radiate outward like the spokes of a perfectly turned wheel.
Latitude lines form neat concentric circles, each wider than the last.
The continents stretch outwards in a ring — the Americas on one side, Eurasia and Africa on the other, with Australia and the Pacific pressing against the outer arc.
At the very edge, where other maps might show a simple coordinate border, Gleason engraved a broad band representing the high southern latitudes — often interpreted in modern flat-earth circles as an “Antarctic ice ring”, though the original map labels focus more on degrees and time than slogans.
Around that outer border runs one of the map’s most distinctive features: a full 24-hour time dial. It is carefully divided into hours and minutes, printed in a way that allows the user to set time at one location and immediately see the local time at any other, simply by following the meridians out to the dial.
The original map was printed in color and sold as a fairly substantial sheet — about 23" × 29" in some surviving examples — often mounted on linen and equipped with two pivoting indicator arms fixed at the North Pole. These arms sometimes carried latitude markings; by swinging them across the map, an owner could line up cities or regions and read the corresponding hour on the outer ring.
To formalize this design, Gleason filed a patent application on August 15, 1892, describing his invention as a “time-chart” based on a flat circular map of the world. The United States Patent Office granted Patent No. 497,917 on May 23, 1893. In the specification, Gleason explains that his invention involves “mechanical devices and geographical illustrations, to be used on a flat circular map of the world” and even notes that the chart represents a transformation of a globe:
The “extorsion” of the map from that of a globe consists mainly in the straightening out of the meridian lines, allowing each to retain its original value from Greenwich, the equator to the two poles.
That line is crucial. To modern readers, it shows that Gleason understood he was projecting a globe onto a plane — a normal act in cartography. At the same time, he chose to base that projection on a layout already favored by 19th-century flat-earth writers and by J. S. Christopher of “Modern College, Blackheath, England,” whose name appears in the map’s full title.
So the map we see is doing two things at once:
In the patent office, it’s an ingenious combined map and longitude-and-time calculator, practical for business and education.
In Gleason’s mind — and in the minds of many who cherish it today — it’s also a model of a level, circular world, with the pole fixed at the middle and human life arranged under a revolving sky.
The Faith Behind the Geometry: Alexander Gleason’s Biblical Earth Map
Is the Bible from Heaven? Is the Earth a Globe?
Not every historical cartographer tied faith to their maps, but Gleason did — for him, Scripture shaped every line, and his own observations of the world around him only confirmed what the Word had already declared.
If the map is the picture, Gleason’s book is the voice explaining it.
The first edition of Is the Bible from Heaven? Is the Earth a Globe? appeared in 1890 as a comparatively short volume, roughly 95 pages, divided in two halves matching its title: one defending the inspiration of the Bible, the other boldly challenging the globe theory. By 1893, after issuing his map, Gleason released a much enlarged second edition — over 400 pages — expanding his biblical arguments and adding reports of experiments on the Erie Canal, where he claimed to have measured perfectly level stretches of water that, in his view, should have shown curvature if the world were round.
Throughout the book, Gleason leans heavily on passages like:
“He hath founded the earth upon the seas, and established it upon the floods.”
“He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved.”
“The four corners of the earth…”
To modern Bible readers, many of those phrases are poetic. To Gleason, they were engineering specifications. He read them as literal descriptions from the Creator about how the world was built and how it continued to be upheld, even today.
In that light, the Biblical Earth Map wasn’t a mere diagram — it was a visual creed. The flat circular plane symbolized a creation that was central, bounded, and purposeful. The time dial around the edge gave that creation rhythm and order. And the fact that the whole layout could be derived from known navigation charts simply confirmed to him that true science and true Scripture must agree.
He was not content simply to denounce modern astronomy; he wanted to replace it with a system that felt both observational and devout. The Erie Canal experiments, the patent, and the map all serve the same goal: to show that a Bible-shaped world can be drawn with the same geometric care as a nautical chart or an engineer’s blueprint.
Gleason’s Flat Earth Map vs. Modern Science
Azimuthal Equidistant Map: A Tool or a Testament?
Modern cartographers see Gleason’s Flat Earth Map as a clear example of a north-polar Azimuthal Equidistant projection — one of many ways of flattening a spherical surface. From the North Pole outward, distances and directions are accurate; distortion grows near the outer ring, especially in the far Southern Hemisphere. This kind of projection is still used today for:
Airline route maps
Radio propagation charts
Certain global planning diagrams
Military navigation
At the same time, the map’s history shows why it continues to be adopted by flat-earth and enclosed-world communities:
Its circular layout feels intuitive — north at the center, directions radiating outward.
The outer boundary visually resembles an encircling ice barrier.
Its use as a “time-chart” fits naturally with the idea of a rotating sun moving over a stationary plane.
So the same Azimuthal Equidistant Map functions in two very different ways:
As a technical projection within conventional science.
As a symbolic diagram for those who see the world as fixed and level.
Mainstream cartographers generally view Gleason’s 1892 map as an example of a north-polar projection — a geometric method of representing the globe on a plane. Others, studying the same design from different premises, see it as a practical model of a level world that appears consistent with observation: horizons that rise to eye level, water surfaces that remain flat across distance, and far-off objects visible well beyond the limits predicted by standard curvature formulas. Both perspectives interpret the same layout through different lenses — one mathematical, the other experiential — and together they explain why the map continues to invite study and debate more than a century later.
Gleason’s genius — and his controversy — lies in the fact that his design lives comfortably in both readings.
The Ferguson Connection: Two Flat Earth Maps, Two Visions
From Hot Springs to Buffalo: America’s Flat Earth Cartographers
If Gleason was the engineer of American flat-earth cartography, Orlando Ferguson was its illustrator.
The two men never co-authored a work, but their maps appeared within a few short years of each other and are now often discussed side by side. As scholars of the movement have noted, by the early 1890s the flat-earth cause in North America had a surprisingly wide base, with figures like Carpenter, Miles Grant, Charles Hathaway, and others publishing pamphlets and holding lectures. In that network, Alexander Gleason and Orlando Ferguson stand out as the creators of its most ambitious visual works.
Gleason’s 1892 map shows a circular, polar-centered projection, deeply rooted in cartographic practice but pressed into the service of Scripture and alternative cosmology. Ferguson’s 1893 “Map of the Square and Stationary Earth” instead portrays the world as a square platform under a curved firmament, with angels at the corners and dozens of caption boxes marching around the border.
Where Gleason’s sheet looks at home in a telegraph office, Ferguson’s looks at home in a revival tent.
Gleason offers tidy geometry, a time dial, and quiet confidence that careful measurement will vindicate his reading of the Bible.
Ferguson offers bold typography, cartoons of men clinging to a spinning globe, and explicit declarations that “four hundred passages in the Bible” condemn the globe theory.
For today’s collectors, the two maps form a pair of companion pieces:
Hang them side by side and you see two ways of defending a similar worldview — one analytical, one dramatic.
Read them with their matching books and you step into a late-19th-century world where faith, skepticism of new science, and print culture intertwined in fascinating ways.
Together, Gleason and Ferguson mark the high-water line of the 19th-century flat-earth revival in America — not as anonymous pamphleteers, but as fully fledged mapmakers who believed the shape of the world could be drawn as surely as it could be preached.
Collecting Gleason’s Map: Originals, Reprints and Legacy
Why Gleason’s Flat Earth Map Still Captivates Collectors
Only a handful of originals survive — at the Leventhal Map Center in Boston, at Yale’s Beinecke Library, and in a few documented private collections. Many of these copies retain their cloth backing, rotating arms, and even printed instructions or descriptive keys on the reverse. When one appears on the rare-map market, it’s treated as a prize: a scarce specimen of religious cartography produced to the same standards as late-Victorian scientific maps.
Most admirers encounter the design through high-resolution reproductions, preserving the aged paper tones and measured lettering that made Gleason’s engraving so graceful. For collectors, historians, and designers, it stands at the intersection of cartography, faith, and industrial art — a conversation piece that bridges centuries.
Why “Gleason’s Flat Earth Map” Still Matters
A Timeless Circle of Faith, Science and Design
Stand before the circle and you’ll feel it: the calm at the center. Every meridian points home; every hour touches the next. The math holds, but so does the metaphor. Gleason offered a world both measurable and meaningful — a design that refused to spin away.
Whether you view it as history, science, or art, the map endures because it unites opposites — precision and belief, science and Scripture, motion and stillness. In an age chasing progress, Gleason’s ink quietly insisted that truth might already be fixed beneath our feet.
Frequently Asked Questions About Alexander Gleason and His 1892 Flat Earth Map
Did Alexander Gleason create any other maps?
No large-format works beyond the 1892 New Standard Map of the World are known. Patent documents and references in his book suggest smaller lecture diagrams and experiments, but the 1892 sheet is his only surviving full world map.
Was the map intended purely as a religious document?
Gleason patented it as a “time-chart,” emphasizing its practical value for navigation and communication. But his writings clearly frame it within a biblical, flat-earth worldview. The same design functioned as a scientific instrument to some users and a theological illustration to others.
What is the Azimuthal Equidistant Map?
It’s a polar projection that keeps true distance from the center point — here, the North Pole. It’s still used today for airline and radio maps. Gleason adopted this geometry and repurposed it as a diagram of a circular, level Earth, turning a standard projection into what many now call Gleason’s Flat Earth Map.
How rare are originals?
Fewer than five verified copies are documented publicly, held mainly at major libraries and a small number of private collections. Because of that rarity, most people experience the design through high-quality reproductions made from archival scans.
How does it compare to Ferguson’s 1893 Square and Stationary Earth Map?
Gleason reasoned with a circular, Azimuthal Equidistant layout and a functional time dial. Ferguson preached with a square Earth, angels at the corners, and dense scripture captions. Together they form the two best-known Flat Earth Maps of the 1890s — one more technical, the other more pictorial — both rooted in a biblical cosmology.
Why Buy Our Gleason’s 1892 New Standard Map of the World
Owning Gleason’s 1892 Flat Earth Map connects you to a rare intersection of faith, design, and discovery. Each ADVENTURE iDIAZ reproduction has been meticulously restored inch by inch, revealing every detail of Gleason’s original lithograph — from the delicate grid lines to the bold time dial encircling the world. The newly refined dial color enhances readability while preserving historical authenticity.
In Gleason’s 1892 design, two movable indicator arms were originally affixed at the North Pole to demonstrate time differences between locations. In our restoration, these have been intentionally omitted to reveal the complete geography beneath and to avoid any confusion or disappointment from fixed, non-functional arms printed on the map.
Printed on tear- and water-resistant polypropylene at an impressive 36" × 58", this large-format edition highlights the map’s intricate lettering, geometry, and structure exactly as Gleason envisioned it.
Ready to frame for the home, office, or classroom, this restored print makes a spectacular art piece and an arresting conversation starter. More than décor, it’s a historical statement — evidence that throughout the ages, conviction and craftsmanship have shaped how we see and experience the world.
Bring home a map that still invites the question: What if the Earth is exactly as it appears?
Own a piece of biblical and cartographic history — the 1892 Gleason’s Flat Earth Map. A timeless work of faith and design, restored and ready to inspire curiosity.
