Columbus didn't discover the Earth was round; he just sailed it.
In short: We are often told that Christopher Columbus had to overcome the 'myth' of a flat Earth to cross the ocean. In reality, the spherical nature of our world was common knowledge long before his voyage. By 1492, the fact that ships wouldn't fall off the edge was a settled science.
The narrative that Renaissance explorers were battling a belief in a flat world is a historical misconception. By the time Columbus set sail in 1492, the spherical shape of the Earth was well-established among educated people and daring seafarers alike. In fact, mariners had been exploring the Atlantic for hundreds of years prior to Columbus, fully aware that the planet was a globe. The Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria were never in danger of sailing over an edge because the curvature of the Earth was already a known fact of geography.
The evidence for a round Earth dates back much further than the Age of Discovery. As early as 384-322 BC, the Greek philosopher Aristotle argued for a spherical Earth by observing the circular shadow it cast on the Moon during lunar eclipses. He also noted that certain stars visible from Egypt were not visible further north. Later, the Alexandria philosopher Eratosthenes took this a step further by calculating the Earth's actual size. He used the difference in the Sun's angle at noon on the summer solstice between Syene and Alexandria to estimate the Earth's circumference at 250,000 stadia.
Other civilizations independently reached similar conclusions. The Greek philosopher Posidonius used the height of the star Canopus above the horizon from different latitudes to estimate the Earth's size. Even further east, the Arab Khalif El Ma'mun ruled in Baghdad from 813 to 833 and commissioned surveyor teams to measure a north-south baseline to determine the Earth's radius. These historical measurements were remarkably close to modern values, proving that the 'discovery' of a round world was a collective human achievement spanning centuries of observation and mathematics.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: The Truth About Columbus and the Round Earth
- Also: The Round Earth and Christopher Columbus
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