This Pancake Earth

The Flat Earth Society gets all the cool flat-earth-in-space pictures.

SING WITH ME, EVERYBODY!

(The tune is supposed to be the same as “Old MacDonald Had a Farm”  but I’ve found it’s more amusing to just pick your favorite melody)

Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.

Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.

With three tall ships, 120 men,

Sailing on, sailing on, sailing on, on, on, on --

Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.

He proved the earth was round, not flat, in 1492.

He proved the earth was round, not flat, in 1492.

With three tall ships, 120 men,

Sailing on, sailing on, sailing on, on, on, on --

He proved the earth was round, not flat in 1492.

(Source.)

This entry isn’t actually about Columbus (though I’m sure I’ll get to him eventually), this entry is about how everyone knows that when Columbus sailed that ocean blue, everyone thought he’d fall off the other side – because EVERYONE knew the earth was flat.

I mean, just look this totally ancient rendition of the earth:

Engraving: L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire

That’s from all the way back in the ancient days of… 1888.

This is the earliest known globe:

I should say it's a recreation of a described globe, created by a guy named Crates of Mallus (don't laugh, Crates was a perfectly respectable Greek name back then) in 150 BCE (which is the same thing as 150BC). That’s only… 1,642 or so years before Columbus and his famous voyage. Maybe Italy and Spain were just slow on the uptake.

Scholars in the Middle Ages certainly knew the earth was round. They even knew how big it was, since in in 240 BCE a man named Eratosthenes  was able to calculate the circumference of the earth to be 250,000 stades. Don’t know what a stade is? Don’t worry, neither did Columbus. He mistook the journey to be about 75% shorter than it really is, due to bad math skills.

You see, no one in Columbus’s time was worried about him falling off the earth; they were worried about the distance his ships would have to cover. There’s only so long food will stay good, and a ship can only carry so much drinking water. Everyone thought he’d run out of supplies and his crew would die of dehydration or starvation. What nobody in Europe knew about was the American continents. Except for the Scandinavians, who had stumbled across North America around 1000 CE., but nobody on continental Europe cared about them.

1434 Vinland Map, showing North America. 1492 is so 58 years from now.

Where did the idea of a flat earth come from? The idea actually flourished between 1870 and 1920. Not that people thought that the earth was flat after 1870 – instead they believed that people pre-Columbus had thought that the earth was flat. Even though there are thousands of references of a spherical earth in writings from Antiquity on through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

There are a couple of reasons why. First of all, people are always willing to believe that the people who lived before them were more stupid than the current generation. Secondly, the insult of believing in a flat earth was a favorite insult for Protestants and Catholics to tell about each other (to show how uncivilized and backwards the other religion was). Lastly, and specifically linking Columbus to the whole thing, was the highly popular 1828 novel, A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, by Washington Irving. It was a massive four volume work, which was the most popularly read and cited book on the life and times of Christopher Columbus for a good century. Unfortunately, Irving made most of it up. 

It made him a lot of money though.