Really, the Earth is Flat?

‘People in the old days thought that the Earth was flat’, have you heard that one? Well, the belief that the Earth is flat is a myth, and the belief that most people thought that is… another myth. Since the dawn of time scholars have known that the Earth is a sphere. Just watching a ship, disappear over the horizon, is an indicator that you are on a rounded surface. The follow-up concept is that if you travel in one direction you will eventually wind up back where you started. The other clue came from observations of the Earth’s shadow on the moon during lunar eclipses. The ancient Greeks conceptualised the Earth as a sphere and wrote scientific works about it. Of course, how the Earth stayed suspended in space was another thing- hence the concept of the planet being supported by Atlas. 

So why do many people today still think that their ancestors believed the Earth to be flat, or is that a myth too? The answer lies in popular culture  of the 1800s and the perpetrators were the well-known American author Washington Irving and Antoine-Jean Letronne, an anti-religious French academic. Letronne described the clerics of the middle-ages ignorant believers in a flat Earth but what really got the public on side was Irving’s fictionalised history of Columbus’ voyage to the Americas, where Columbus set out to disprove the ‘fictional’ belief that the Earth was flat. The issue in the 1490s was not the shape of the Earth, but its size, and the position of the east coast of Asia, as Irving points out. 

This globe from around the time of Columbus is considered to be one of the oldest globes ever made.
Credit:  Alexander Franke (Ossiostborn), CC BY-SA 2.0.