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Originally Posted by Frame57
In Columbus' day people of science and sea faring men stil thought the earth was flat and that you could fall off the edge of it.
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Actually that's not true either. Eratosthenes of Cyrene calculated the diameter of the Earth in the second century B.C., and Claudius Ptolemaeus, or Ptolemy, had done further calculations not much after that. Columbus' chief opponent didn't believe the Earth was flat, but that it was much larger than Columbus himself claimed. It turned out that he was right and old Cristoforo Columbo was wrong.
The belief that they thought the Earth was flat is an invention of Washington Irving.