Irving's narrative included a scene where Columbus had to pitch a royal commission on his voyage an event which Irving had to entirely invent, as the actual minutes of any such meeting were never recorded. This author may have been inspired by Washington Irving, the author of such tales as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip van Winkle, who also wrote a book called The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus in 1828. When Columbus lived, people thought the Earth was flat. A case in point was the 1919 Boys' and Girls' Reader, in which the very first sentence of the very first chapter on history was: It's not clear how or exactly when this myth was born, but examples are easy to find. For it wasn't until the mid-1800s that any sort of an organized flat Earth lobby existed in fact even the very idea that people ever thought the Earth was flat is only a few years older than that.Īn entire mythology has arisen claiming that authorities used to believe the Earth was flat.
While that seems quite recent compared to how long the flat Earth theory must have been around, it's actually a large chunk of it. It's had a spotty history, having never really been much more than a newsletter mailing list, and it's only been around since 1956. The Flat Earth Society does indeed exist, but its current incarnation is quite a bit different today than what was originally founded.
Perhaps of the greatest interest is the question of why certain beliefs were adopted in cases where the observations conflicted with the dogma. We're going to try and sort all this out, to see who actually believes what today, and who actually believed what going back through history. While this is described as an ancient, pre-scientific belief, it's increasingly common today to point out that very few ancient societies who had any meaningful science actually believed the Earth was flat. The Flat Earth Society is well known, and widely assumed to be a group of people who lobby the idea that the Earth is not actually a globe.
#ZETETIC ASTRONOMY AUTHOR SERIES#
Today we're going to point the skeptical eye at a series of beliefs that are said to be about the shape of the Earth.
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