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

CAMPBELL'S MECHANISM 367
tributes the stability of the earth on its axis of rotation.
Maxwell, in the foregoing passage, suggests that in the absence
of the equatorial bulge, any change in the crust (meaning,
it is clear, the creation of any protuberance or excess
weight at any point) would change the position of the planet
on the axis of rotation. Even before I located this passage in
Maxwell, a peculiar device designed by Brown had made this
principle clear to me by
observation. This device consisted
of a globe mounted on three trunnions in such a way that it
could rotate in any direction. The globe was a perfect sphere
and had no equatorial bulge. It was suspended by a string
to an overhead point. To rotate this sphere, all that was
necessary was to wind it up and then let it go. Brown had a
and it was
weight attached to the South Pole of the sphere,
observable that, as soon as the sphere began to rotate rapidly,
the weight was flung to the equator, where it stabilized the
direction of rotation as long as the speed of rotation was
maintained. Later Campbell made a larger model of Brown's
device, which I rotated unweighted, and I observed that it
had no stable axis of spin. Two motions were observable: a
rapid rotation, and a slow, random drifting. It was evident
that the mass of the sphere acted as a stabilizer of the speed
of rotation, but had no influence on its direction. This experiment,
strongly confirming Brown's claim, encouraged me
to persist until I could find positive theoretical confirmation
of the observation, which eventually I did in the works of
Maxwell.
I was amazed and chagrined in this connection to note a
phenomenon which, nevertheless, is as old as science itself.
The professors most of them, at any ratewould not come to
see the device.
Perhaps I should describe this device in greater detail.
A trunnion is like a ring or a hoop, made of metal. A globe
is mounted in this trunnion on two pivots set into the ring
at points opposite each other (180 degrees apart). Then, if
the ring is held (as it often is on a model globe) by a pediment
or stand, the globe will rotate. Its axis will be deter-