Humans have known the earth is round for thousands of years (2018)

https://www.history.com/news/christopher-columbus-never-set-out-to-prove-the-earth-was-round

by thunderbong • 3 years ago

36 81 3 years ago

jeffbee• 3 years ago

The linked source material is a condensed version of the book “Inventing The Flat Earth” which I quite enjoyed when it was assigned in a university course.

mikebonnell2• 3 years ago

I highly recommend "American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World" if you're interested in learning more about Columbus from a very well documented and sourced non-fiction book.

p-e-w2• 3 years ago

I haven't read that book, but the title already suggests that it isn't exactly a balanced account of what happened. It's like "Modern Slavery: The First 200 Years of Capitalism".

xref5• 3 years ago

Sometimes well, things aren’t balanced. The job of historians isn’t to create balance at the expense of facts. A great example would be the actual Holocaust, where a “balanced” history would be completely disingenuous.

carlivar• 3 years ago

Columbus didn't discover America, either!

https://www.history.com/news/the-viking-explorer-who-beat-co...

bigmattystyles• 3 years ago

It was certainly news to the inhabitants.

camjohnson26• 3 years ago

He connected the civilizations

dvt9• 3 years ago

The relatively modern hate-boner for Columbus is kind of weird, and I'm not exactly sure why it's reached such prominence. I'm not Spanish or Portuguese, but I fail to see why lauding explorers is a contemporarily bad thing, colonialism or not.

xref5• 3 years ago

Weeeellll you hand waived a lot away there with ‘colonialism or not’. “I don’t know what the hate-boner for Bill Cosby is, why is lauding comedians a bad thing”

dllthomas• 3 years ago

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day explains how Columbus was unusually bad (and, accurate or not, might have been a partial cause of the modern hate-boner for Columbus, along with waves at everything else).

unmole6• 3 years ago

Columbus was Italian.

zakki• 3 years ago

I have never been going to America (the continent). If I go there now can I tell my family that I discover America?

hotpotamus2• 3 years ago

I don't think anyone questions his tenacity as an explorer. I always thought calling what he did the "reunification" of the old and new world was about right. It's more the plunder and enslavement of the native people that people have a problem with I'd guess. I'm also under the impression that a lot of the positive Columbus marketing was a 19th/20th Century US thing to help boost the social status of Italian immigrants; I don't really know his approval rating throughout the centuries, but I think you've right that it's down as of late.

khazhoux• 3 years ago

A not-insignificant number of people think that Europeans should never have settled there, and it should have been left in its pastoral state to tribal people, meanwhile the rest of the world advanced technologically and industrially on its own.

Mistletoe• 3 years ago

I think you need to read further to the parts where he started cutting natives’ hands off.

Here’s even a comic for you.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day

relix• 3 years ago

As everyone's "hate-boner" will be personal, to me a part that stands out is that Columbus seemed to be a conspiracy theorist akin to the flat-earther. The reason why his expedition took so long to get funding, is not because he was the only one who thought the earth was round, but it's that he used wrong calculations in order to calculate the size of the earth, and he was under the impression that it was much smaller than it actually is. Now at that time, similar to how everyone knew the earth was round, people had a pretty good idea of the actual size of the earth as well - it was already known in ancient Greece after all.

So when he claimed "I can reach the far east by sailing around the other side of the world in X days, as it's just a distance of Y miles" that was against common knowledge of that time, and everyone knew that a trip like that would take 2Y or 3Y miles, something unfeasible with the technology of that time.

The only reason his ship didn't perish halfway like everyone expected them to, is that there just happened to be a continent halfway that they stumbled upon. Columbus is a prime example of "task failed successfully".

Donckele2• 3 years ago

I'm not Spanish or Portuguese

Because you are “American”?

marcell• 3 years ago

15th century was a time of conquest and brutality around the world:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15th_century

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_sexual_violence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_by_ordeal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_wheel

etc.

I doubt Columbus's conquest was uniquely brutal for its time. The distinctive fact about him is that he discovered America, and kicked off the events that led to the formation of the US.

eesmith8• 3 years ago

I did not find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbus_Day#Opposition_to_Col... to be unclear.

It's kind of weird to laud one specific explorer, yearly. Before the late 1800s, Columbus Day wasn't really a thing, so it's not like that sort of lauding expresses a widespread innate desire.

Instead, Columbus Day celebrations in the US need to be seen through the lens of xenophobia, as the then-newly immigrated Italian American celebrate a sort of Pride Day in the face of racism (they were not seen as really white) and religious bigotry (most were Catholic, not Protestant).

It's also kinda weird that the century-long love-boner for Columbus caused so many people to omit any open discussion about how horrible a person he was, and the brutal policies he put into place. When do we teach that to the kids?

BigCryo• 3 years ago

The war against the American working class I think is something that was waged by Capital against the majority American working class starting centuries ago.. Capital was always been opposed to the majority of the working class in America because there's always been a conflict between Capital versus labor over the use of cheap labor.. the war waged by Capital extended to propaganda war, and all things associated with the culture of the European American working class came under attack by capital.. including Columbus

eesmith8• 3 years ago

Or as the article put it:

Of course, his “discovery” wasn’t new either as the Americas had been known to indigenous people for thousands of years, and Vikings since the 11th century

timonoko• 3 years ago

Vikings did not discover America either. It was Finns. http://www.paabo.ca/uirala/uini-seagoingskinboats.html

Short Summary: Global Nomadic sea-going nation on Arctic Ocean.

darepublic• 3 years ago

He didn’t think Earth was flat, but by jumpstarting the Age of Exploration, he changed the course of human history.

Of course he didn't think the earth was flat, it was everyone else who did. Until he proved it was round!

eesmith8• 3 years ago

Literally from the article:

Despite a persistent legend, neither Columbus nor his Spanish patrons thought Earth was a finite plane instead of a round planet. And you can blame one of the United States’ greatest authors for creating a myth that still surrounds one of history’s best-known figures ...
It’s almost certain that in the 1490s, nobody thought the earth was flat. According to historian Jeffrey Burton Russell, “no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat.”

hef198982• 3 years ago

For those going to sea, or living on coast lines, itvwas clear the earth was round. For everyone else it didn't really matter either way.

hotpotamus2• 3 years ago

Everyone had a pretty good idea that the Earth was round, but the size was somewhat up for debate. Columbus did some bad math and came up with a really badly underestimated size and thought he had a clever way to the indies. If he hadn't run into a whole other continent unknown to him, he'd have perished long before he made it all the way around the Earth. The part I find most bizarre I think is that we still call Native Americans "Indians" to this day based on his now half-millennia old mistake.

kergonath2• 3 years ago

There is some survivor bias at play. We don’t know how many other people attempted the crossing before him just to get lost at sea.

zmgsabst• 3 years ago

For people who want to know more about how Eratosthenes and the Greeks estimated the size, within a few percent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes

AraceliHarker• 3 years ago

People in the Middle Ages believed that the earth was the center of the universe, while it was common knowledge that the earth was a sphere.

antognini2• 3 years ago

A few years ago I spent a little bit of time digging into the earliest claims that the Earth was round. As the article says, they seem to go back to 600 BC, but unfortunately the sources from that era are all pretty patchy (they're copies of fragments of quotations of the original texts). Some assert that Pythagoras was the first to claim that the Earth is round, others say Parmenides, but they didn't seem to have offered any real evidence.

By the time of Aristotle in the late 300s, though, there was pretty substantial evidence that the Earth was round and Aristotle collected it all together. Broadly, the arguments could be put into two categories: empirical arguments and theoretical arguments.

The empirical arguments were pretty clever. Astronomers noted that whenever there was a lunar eclipse, the shadow of the Earth was always curved the same way. Since lunar eclipses occurred at different times and different locations on the sky, it could only produce the same shadow if the Earth itself was spherical. Another argument relied on a somewhat fortunate coincidence that one of the brightest stars in the sky, Canopus, is right on the horizon at the latitude of Greece. Astronomers noticed that they could see this star low on the horizon when the traveled to southern cities like Alexandria, but could not see it in northern cities like Athens. This also implied that the Earth was round. Later on Eratosthenes was able to use this principle to measure the size of the Earth and got the answer right to within 1% (although he probably got a bit lucky since he seems to have made two mistakes which partially cancelled each other out).

Aristotle's theoretical justification for a round Earth wasn't too far off the mark, either. His basic argument was that because matter tends to fall to the center of the Earth, if the Earth was some other shape, the matter would rearrange itself until it achieved a spherical shape. His theory of motion was all wrong, but the basic idea that a system with radial forces would produce spheres was correct.

(Shameless plug: I do a podcast on the history of astronomy, so if you want to hear more on the subject I have much more to say [1].)

[1] https://songofurania.com/

xref5• 3 years ago

I had never heard of the two errors in Eratosthenes calculations I’ll have to look that up! Also farther down someone pointed out that coastal dwellers would all see the hull disappear before the mast over the horizon, suggesting a sphere

Thanks for the podcast link, how deeply astronomy is intertwined with history is fascinating, subscribed!

antognini2• 3 years ago

Eratosthenes's method basically relied on knowing the distance between two cities and the differ in the elevation of the Sun at those two cities. When he measured the change in elevation, he expressed it as "1/50th the circumference of a circle," which works out to be 7.2 degrees, whereas the true change in elevation is 7.5 degrees.

He also assumed that the southern city (Smyrna) was exactly on the Tropic of Cancer. In fact it's a little north of it, but this assumption partially compensated for using too small a change in elevation. Then at another point he rounded up his answer to get a number that was divisible by 360 which further compensated for the original error and he ended up with a final result that was surprisingly good.

dogma1138• 3 years ago

The oldest surviving globe is from about the same time as Columbus started his voyages.

It ofc notably does not include the Americas. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdapfel

Humans have known the earth is round for thousands of years (2018)

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