Hundreds of Victorians believed the earth was flat, duped by the lectures and literature of an obsessive gang of fanatics. It was a scandal that entangled scientists and astonished the general public with its weird theories, bizarre experiments, lawsuits and even death threats. The story bears all the hallmarks of a good Victorian melodrama - and yet the controversy continued into the twentieth century, despite the Apollo missions and widely publicised pictures of the earth from space.