Physician Cyrus Reed Teed received what he called an illumination in 1869 and rebuilt cosmology: we live on the inner face of a hollow shell, the entire universe contained within. His Koreshan Unity settled at Estero, Florida, in 1894, roughly two hundred members at its peak, running businesses and a power plant. In 1897 his surveyors ran the Rectilineator, a precision straightedge apparatus, along Naples beach for months and declared the waterline converged upward: the Earth curves inward. The results were published in The Cellular Cosmogony, 1899.
Teed taught that he would rise after death. When he died on December 22, 1908, followers kept vigil over the body until county officials ordered burial. The community dwindled for fifty more years; in 1961 the last members donated 305 acres to Florida, now Koreshan State Park, where the Art Hall and the Rectilineator shed still stand. Newspapers nationwide covered the geodetic survey with interest, but the historical record is blunt: only the Koreshans took the results seriously.
The claim: cellular cosmogony is anxiety management by geometry, a finite universe with humanity at the center of the only surface, no infinite void, no alien heights, everything contained and owned, the cosmos as womb rather than wilderness. Verdict: plausible psychology, and Teed's own rhetoric, the finite, cellular universe versus the atheistic infinite, supports it. But every cosmology is also a mood. The heliocentric void sells its own comfort: nothing is watching. Both are shelters. One just fits the instruments.
If your instrument says the ocean bends upward, do you doubt the ocean or the sky?