Never Said It: Round Before Columbus
A very round globe packs a tiny case while medieval astronomy and Irving’s 1828 biography correct a familiar tale.
The dispute was about distance
Columbus did not establish Earth’s round shape against a universally flat-earth medieval world. Sacrobosco’s astronomy textbook, composed around 1230, already explained a spherical Earth. Columbus underestimated the westward distance to Asia, combining an overextended Asia with a too-small Earth. In 1828 Washington Irving gave the story a dramatic council scene with flat-earth objections, but even he said other examiners accepted a globe. This short follows those two dated texts without treating Irving as the inventor of every version of the tale.
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Never Said It
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