[Pelham]

“It’s actually a myth that people still thought the Earth was flat back then. A myth that still gets published in school books unfortunately.”

Absolutely.

People had known that the Earth is round since the time that they first were able to sail far enough from the shore to watch the shore disappear over the horizon. It wasn’t lost on them why you would see the high ground reappear first.

[Impy]

I don’t know about today but when was in grade school in the 90’s, the flat Earth BS was right there in the history book along with plenty of other inaccurate information. It’s a disgrace.

Another big myth people believe, I think some teacher told me blood was blue in your body, tons of idiots look at their veins and believe this. Funny, I never heard of blue blood cells.

[muawiyah]

Actually, the European view of the Earth's shape back in the 1400s was rather maleable. Absent a good way of keeping time while measuring latitude, East/West distances were highly inaccurate.

Columbus' pitch to the French and Spanish royal courts was that the Earth was shaped kind of like a football! That meant that the distance from Europe to Asia was much shorter than they imagined and at the same time the measurement of the combined width of Africa and East Asia was just as wide as they believed.

The Spanish bought the story.