Why did we credit Columbus as the FIRST with the idea that the world was round and not flat?

Question

Very few people at the time of Columbus actually believed that the Earth was flat. Anyone standing on a mountain top would have seen this not to be true. In fact, I think it was generally accepted by everyone that the world was round during the time of Jesus' life. So why did anyone ever get the idea that Columbus was trying to prove that the world was round?

What does this say about other areas of history that might be obscured???

I think Pythagoras in the 6th century BC was the first with the idea that the Earth was a sphere.

Answer 1

This isn't history that is necessarily obscured, this is just one of those fallacies that has grown due to our failure to accept the intelligence of those civilisations before us.

Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle all suggested that the Earth is a sphere but Eratosthenes (276 BC - 194 BC) went one better by estimating the Earth's circumference around 240 BC. He had heard about a place in Egypt where the Sun was directly overhead at the summer solstice and used geometry to come up with a circumference of 250,000 stades. This estimate astonishes some modern writers, as it is within 2% of the modern value of the equatorial circumference, 40,075 kilometres.

Answer 2

I think that notion that everyone thought the world was flat may be a bit overplayed. The knowledge of the Romans, yes in Jesus time, was that there was curvature of the earth.

I think that the people who were saying the world was flat were connected to those who were sponsoring the Columbus trip to the East Indies via the other ocean, so Columbus had to prove them wrong.

What WAS a surprise was this other continent in the way of the trip to the East Indies. That turned out to be quite a distraction.

Answer 3

Before he set sail on his voyage to America, Columbus was criticized for miscalculating the distance from Europe to Asia as being shorter than it really is.
People may not have known that there would be the American continent blocking the way to Asia, but they were able to accurately calculate the size of the Earth and so they knew that his trip would take much longer than Columbus thought. That's the reason why no one bothered to sail west instead of east to get to Asia before, because it would take too long, not because they were afraid they would fall off the edge of the flat world.

Answer 4

He wasn't the first... He was the first, however, to use the theory in navigation successfully. That's why we talk about him still. He used the pre-existing idea that the earth was round to make a short cut to (what he thought was) Asia. What hurt him was that earlier scientists had assumed that the Earth's LAND area was smaller than it actually is. He just didn't know there was a whole continent in-between!

Answer 5

I think he was trying to find a new way to India