It was Irving who wrote that it was thanks to Columbus’s voyages that scientists first realized the earth wasn’t flat. In 1828, Washington Irving (1783-1859), the American writer best known for his stories Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, published A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, which purports to be a biography but is in fact historical fiction, Irving having taken more than a few liberties with the material that was available to him. The fact is that Columbus was well acquainted with Ptolemy’s work and often referred to it on his voyage.

One wonders why the notion garnered so much traction in the nineteenth century, traction that’s continued to our own time? You’ve no doubt heard the stories about Christopher Columbus being warned not to try to find the New World because he’d fall off the edge of the earth and that would be the end of him, but this is a myth. There may have been the occasional adherent to the theory, but very few educated people believed the earth was flat. Even stories about people in the Middle Ages believing in a flat earth are inaccurate. It’s true that very ancient cultures had no conception of a round earth, but the reality is that the earth as a sphere hasn’t been in doubt since at least the time of Pythagoras. When his work was translated into Latin in the fifteenth century, it became an essential reference for scholars, astronomers, geographers, and explorers. Ptolemy also addressed projection problems – the difficulties associated with representing the globe on paper – and he also came up with the concepts of latitude and longitude. Ancient Greek thinkers such as Pythagoras established that the earth was round way back in the sixth century BCE and Ptolemy’s reference work Geographia, written in the second century CE, deemed a round earth the only logical conclusion based on the astronomical observations of scholars over the centuries. For example, the idea that the earth was flat is a much more recent phenomenon than you might think. However, a modern punchline the movement is not, as the theory of a flat earth is something we’ve had to deal with for eons.įirst off, there’s a great deal of misinformation out there about what people believed in times gone by. Consider this the definitive list.Ģ018 saw an International Flat Earth Conference and, with it, the irony of its members flying around the world in order to attend it. While the flat-earth theory is new in intensity, it is old in practice.

History of flat earth theory