In August of 1818, when John Symmes Jr. published to the world his great discovery, he also attached a certificate attesting to his sanity. He need not have bothered: many people thought him crazy anyway when he announced that the earth was hollow. To him, it was no mere theory but a deduction based on the vast evidence he had gathered. For the rest of his life, he traveled and lectured to spread his idea. He lobbied President John Quincy Adams, who was interested, and Congress, who was not, to fund an expedition to the North Pole to find the opening he knew was there.
Symmes was neither the first nor the last to imagine other lands and peoples inside the earth.
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