[8] He was named for his uncle John Cleves Symmes, a delegate to the Continental Congress, a Colonel in the Revolutionary War, Chief Justice of New Jersey, father-in-law of US President William Henry Harrison[9] and pioneer in the settlement and development of the Northwest Territory.

[10] Symmes "received a good common English education"[11] and on March 26, 1802, at the age of twenty-two, obtained a commission as an Ensign in the US Army[10] (with the assistance of his uncle).

[10] During the War of 1812, Symmes was initially stationed in Missouri Territory until 1814 when his 1st Infantry Regiment was sent to Canada, arriving just in time to provide relief to American forces at the Battle of Lundy's Lane.

He began a campaign of circulars, newspaper letters, and lectures aimed at defending and promoting his hypothesis of a Hollow Earth—and to build support for a polar expedition to vindicate his theory.

[18] He also believed that the spheres revolved at different rates and upon different axes, and that the apparent instability of magnetic North in the Arctic could be explained by travelers moving unawares across and along the verge between the inner and outer earths.

[19] Symmes generalized his theory beyond just the Earth, claiming that "the Earth as well as all the celestial orbicular bodies existing in the inverse, visible and invisible, which partake in any degree of a planetary nature, from the greatest to the smallest, from the sun down to the most minute blazing meteor or falling star, are all constituted, in a greater or less degree, of a collection of spheres".

While Halley's contemporaries found the geomagnetic data he had gathered to be of interest, his proposal of a Hollow Earth was never widely accepted.

The theory remained dear to Halley; he chose to have his final portrait (as Astronomer Royal) painted depicting him holding a drawing of the Earth's interior as a set of concentric spheres.

[16] Some scholars have proposed that Symmes may have learned of Halley's Hollow Earth via Cotton Mather's book, The Christian Philosopher, a popular survey of science as natural theology.

The version of the Hollow Earth theory ascribed to Euler lacked the concentric spheres of Halley's proposal, but added the element of an interior sun.

[10] And in 1820, Symmes began to promote his theory directly, lecturing on it in Cincinnati and other towns and cities in the region,[31] making use of a wooden globe with the polar sections removed to reveal the inner Earth and the spheres within.

Some think it was written as a satire of Symmes's ideas, and believe they identified the author as early American writer Nathaniel Ames.

Another follower, Jeremiah N. Reynolds apparently had an article that was published as a separate booklet in 1827: Remarks of Symmes' Theory Which Appeared in the American Quarterly Review.

Edgar Allen Poe's' short story "MS. Found in a Bottle" (1833), which describes a ship driven toward the South Pole by a storm and consumed by a whirlpool there, may have been inspired by Symmes' assertions, or have been intended as a satire of Symzonia itself.

[37][38] Symmes features as the source of information about the hollow Earth used as a literary trope in Grigsby, Alcanoan O and Mary P. Lowe's "Nequa, or The Problem of the Ages" (1900).

John Cleves Symmes also makes an appearance in Rudy Rucker's steampunk novel, The Hollow Earth, and in Felix J. Palma's The Map of the Sky.