The Earth's Shifting Crust by Charles Hapgood - wire of information

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EARTH'S SHIFTING CRUST
point of my own, was an engineer, and his concepts of the
earth's motions were based upon simple mechanics. He understood
gyroscopic action, and the stabilizing role of the rim
of a rotating flywheel. He also understood the laws of cen-
trifugal effect as applied to weights
eccentric to the axes of
spin of rotating bodies. It was my good fortune that Campbell,
who was to carry the work forward, also was a mechan-
ical engineer.
Brown had made the statement that it was the equatorial
bulge of the globe that stabilized it with reference to the axis
of rotation; he had it compared to the rim of a flywheel. I
found that this statement was disputed by some physicists.
The physicists suggested that the stability of the earth on
its axis was not owing to the centrifugal effect of the rota-
tion of the equatorial bulge alone, but to that of the rotation
of the entire mass of the earth. Later I discovered a passage
in Coleman that appeared to express their point of view:
It may be suggested that the earth is a gyroscope, and, as such, has
a very powerful tendency to keep its axis of rotation pointing con-
tinuously in the same direction. Any sudden change in the direction
would probably wreck the world completely (87:263).
I wished to obtain a clear statement of the rights of this
matter. Accordingly, I corresponded with specialists, who
eventually referred me to the works of James Clerk Maxwell,
in one of whose papers I found the following statement
in support of Brown's position:
. . . The permanence of latitude essentially depends on the in-
equality of the earth's axes, for if they had all been equal, any alteration
of the crust of the earth would have produced new principal
axes, and the axis of rotation would travel round about those axes,
altering the latitudes of all places, and yet not in the least altering
the position of the axis of rotation among the stars (296:261).
For the word "axes" in the second line we may read "diame-
ters," and of course Maxwell is referring to the inequality
of the polar and equatorial diameters, that is, to the existence
of the equatorial bulge, to which, therefore, he directly at-