As has been mentioned, no educated people from the times of the old Greeks thought the world was flat - the old greeks calculated its circumference famously!
Rather, what Columbus believed was that the Earth was a much smaller circumference than anybody else believed - and he turned out to be wrong! The smaller size meant that with the ships of that time he could carry enough food and water to make the journey, while everybody else with naval knowledge at that time said “the distance is too long, you’ll die out on the ocean”.
If Columbus hadn’t stumbled over the Americas, which nobody expected there, then he would have died of thirst in the middle of the ocean, instead of reaching India as he had planned.
Of course, either Eratosthenes got lucky, or modern accounts benefit from assuming the length for a “stadion” leading to the most accurate results, or both. He deserves full credit for his methodology, but he just didn’t have accurate enough data available to get THAT close. It would have still been noteworthy with an error of 10-20% instead of 1%.
Another factor in Columbus’ proposal is that he was working from common overestimates for overland distances traveling east. Making his estimate for the distance heading west that much shorter. It wasn’t so much that Columbus fabricated grossly wrong figures out of thin air. He just combined the most favorable assumptions he could find for several factors. Much like people trying to get funding for projects today will do.
I always think that SOMEBODY listening to his proposal, and realizing the length of uncharted ocean he was going to cross thought about the possibility of there being a whacking huge unknown land mass in the way, and factored that into their thinking.
I’ve heard that the reason for Columbus’s underestimate was that he had heard Scandanavian tales of the voyages of Lief and others, and thus knew that there was in fact some land or other over there. His mistake was just that he assumed that the land Lief had reached was Asia.
And I have a hard time seeing how Halley could have believed in a habitable hollow Earth. As an associate of Newton’s, he certainly had the education to know that there wouldn’t be any gravity inside a hollow spherical shell. Maybe he did believe it (he was only human, after all), but he shouldn’t have.
Around the 17th century for western influenced Chinese astronomers; perhaps up to the 19th century for non-western influenced Chinese peasants. Wiki Flat Earth As late as 1595, the first Jesuit missionary to China, Matteo Ricci, recorded that the Chinese say: “The earth is flat and square, and the sky is a round canopy; they did not succeed in conceiving the possibility of the antipodes”. The universal belief in a flat Earth is confirmed by a contemporary Chinese encyclopedia from 1609 illustrating a flat Earth extending over the horizontal diametral plane of a spherical heaven.
In the 17th century, the idea of a spherical Earth spread in China due to the influence of the Jesuits, who held high positions as astronomers at the imperial court. The Ge Chi Cao treatise of Xiong Ming-yu (1648) showed a printed picture of the Earth as a spherical globe, with the text stating that “the round earth certainly has no square corners”. The text also pointed out that sailing ships could return to their port of origin after circumnavigating the waters of the Earth.
Obviously Wiki is not always reliable; but considering the extraordinary need to attribute nearly all inventions to the Chinese — paralleled by the countervailing need by Islamicists to attribute robotics and municipal gas lighting to Islam — it is fairly obvious that this can’t be argued against.
But again, for a Chinese merchant or peasant stuck in the middle of China a long way from the sea, a flat earth would seem plausible and the difference to them minimal.
I’m currently reading some magazines from 1867: in one article on Chinese events, the death penalty being applied to batches of 200 people beheaded at a time; in another mentioning of a captured cavalryman being boiled alive. So even 150 years ago China was still practising the old ways whilst entering the modern steam age. It’s unsurprising they would continue at that time with retrograde thinking on scientific models.
Jackson had a strong hatred for debt (all of Jackson’s hatreds were strong). He’d have regarded expenditures as foolish. He wasn’t hesitant about vetoing legislation either, far more than his predecessors. He managed to completely pay off the national debt, although the Panic of 1837 under his successor Martin Van Buren permanently put the USA in debt again.
Contemporaries were either strongly pro or anti Jackson. My guess is saying he was a flat earther is the invention of a political opponent.
This makes it sound like Van Buren was responsibility for the Panic. Jackson was, and got out just in time.*
Please don’t quote the next part where it talks about “others” who take a different view. Those others turn out to be believers in Austrian Theory. There are one or two at this Board, but there are one or two birthers and truthers at this Board as well.
Naw- that was made up, but it was a parable, made to show how great GW was even as a tad. The other is a plain scurrilous lie. Jackson was actually a pretty good President at that time, but was certainly a Man of his Times, or maybe even a Man of Times not too long Past.
I don’t deny that; but the schools found it easier to simplify history (as certain people want them to do now) than to deal with the complexities. This makes a certain amount of sense when you’re dealing with grade school, and since kids rarely went beyond grade school in the 19th century, there just wasn’t enough time to go through the entire story. Thus the myth of Columbus was handy shorthand and simpler to remember that “Columbus thought the Earth was round, but bad underestimated the size and thus thought he could reach the Indies before his ships ran out of provisions. He was lucky enough to have a continent near enough to reach and thus returned to Spain so that the existence of it was first publicized throughout Europe.”
Why? The earth could be as flat as a pancake, but if it were very thick there could still be a hole at the “North Pole” (which would really be the center of the flat disc) which leads down to a vast holloow inhabited by all kinds of people. So a belief in a flat earth and a hollow earth are compatible.
Now, be fair: There were a whole lot of people in those Times who were not murderously vicious racists just a hair away from actually being genocidal.
Or were Papa Doc Duvalier and Saddam Hussein also just Men of Their Times?
Now, about the Columbus/Flat Earth thing, I have a question: How in the holy great blazes does re-discovering the New World prove the world is round? Was the guy who made that up even reading what he was writing?
Let’s say I have a hypothesis that I can walk to the hospital from my place by going west. I end up going to a really great restaurant. Hypothesis proved!
I’m not sure exactly what your point is here. I don’t think Washington Irving said that discovering America proved the Earth was round; just that Columbus ultimately turned out to be correct in believing that. (Although he distorted the basic argument by saying his opponents believed that the Earth was flat.) The fact that the Earth was round was demonstrated by Magellan’s voyage.
Heh heh … either this is the most deadpan escalation of the joke ever, or I misunderstood your reply to bonzer’s joke as a furthering of the joke when it was just a whoosh.
No, it was Jackson. Van Buren didn’t take office until March of 1837, by which time nearly the entire stinking, shameful business had been completed. It was Jackson who did it, and Jackson who should have been impeached for it, and Jackson who, in all probability, is burning in Hell for it.
So large an error? All you need to do is measure two angles and one distance.
Sure, large distances were tricky. Pace-counting is about the best you can hope for. But professional pace-counters surely were able to do better than 10-20% error? As for angles, I can’t see how anyone, even working with home-built equipment, could do that poorly! I can fold a protractor out of paper and get error rates under 2%.
I would agree that 1% was remarkable, but he might have taken several different measurements and averaged them, reducing overall error. He might have talked to lots of different people who’d travelled between Alexandria and Syene and worked out a decent estimate of the distance. He might have built some clever and accurate protractors…
My opinion is that a high school student today, building his own equipment from scratch, and making some “convenient assumptions” regarding distance, could easily bring in an estimate within 5% accuracy.
Judging people long dead is easy. Judging them well is not. I think you miss some significant and important facts, and the reason that people often separate the Cherokee from the other Indian removals, and why it is significant that jackson was not president then.
The other tribes were hostile and likely candidates for British influence. Jackson was not particularly anti-Indian. He was, however, very much anti-British and saw the Indians as a strategic weakness the United States (then less than two decades from the brutal war of 1812). As long as the Indians were possible British allies, they would be removed. The terms of that removal might vary from complete annihilation to relocation. Jackson preferred the former, and believed that border frictions would inevitably lead to massacres.His solution may not have bee better, but he clearly didn’t want them wiped out.
This is why the Cherokee removal was different; they were interested in becoming American citizens, perhaps even forming their own state. They had adopted many American ways, often including religion and English speech. Jackson seems to have been uncertain about what to do with him and took only preliminary measures against the possibility of removing them.
And jackson was this obnoxiously resistant to being pigeonholed in every area of life. He was pragmatic, except when being ideological. He was racist, except for all the things he did for equality and individual respect. He was a southern slave-owner, but also patriotically enthusiastic for the Union (to the point of threateninig South Carolina with bloody murder if they tried to secede).
In short, if you condemn Jackson, you pretty much end up condemning all humanity. He did what he did because he thought it was the best possible solution in an ugly situation. Skirmishes and bloodshed had gone on between settlers and tribesman more or less since Europeans first came to America, and it wasn’t always white men who started it. It was, however, usually white men who ended it. Jackson did no more than that, and in the end, it’s more or less what peoples who couldn’t get along have always done, not because it was nice but because it was an end.