<P> Hooker eventually relented and agreed to support the pension request . </P> <P> In 1870, a Flat - Earth proponent named John Hampden offered a £ 500 wager (equivalent to about £ 44,000 in present - day terms) in a magazine advertisement to anyone who could demonstrate a convex curvature in a body of water such as a river, canal, or lake . Wallace, intrigued by the challenge and short of money at the time, designed an experiment in which he set up two objects along a six - mile (10 km) stretch of canal . Both objects were at the same height above the water, and he mounted a telescope on a bridge at the same height above the water as well . When seen through the telescope, one object appeared higher than the other, showing the curvature of the earth . </P> <P> The judge for the wager, the editor of Field magazine, declared Wallace the winner, but Hampden refused to accept the result . He sued Wallace and launched a campaign, which persisted for several years, of writing letters to various publications and to organisations of which Wallace was a member denouncing him as a swindler and a thief . Wallace won multiple libel suits against Hampden, but the resulting litigation cost Wallace more than the amount of the wager and the controversy frustrated him for years . </P> <P> In the early 1880s, Wallace was drawn into the debate over mandatory smallpox vaccination . Wallace originally saw the issue as a matter of personal liberty; but, after studying some of the statistics provided by anti-vaccination activists, he began to question the efficacy of vaccination . At the time, the germ theory of disease was very new and far from universally accepted . Moreover, no one knew enough about the human immune system to understand why vaccination worked . When Wallace did some research, he discovered instances where supporters of vaccination had used questionable, in a few cases completely phony, statistics to support their arguments . Always suspicious of authority, Wallace suspected that physicians had a vested interest in promoting vaccination, and became convinced that reductions in the incidence of smallpox that had been attributed to vaccination were, in fact, due to better hygiene and improvements in public sanitation . </P>

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