Wasn't it Magellan?

Well, Columbus was notorious for stealing other people's credit. I suppose this is an example of that.

Wikipedia has some information about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl...historiography

Basically, it says that most people during (and before) Columbus's time already believed the earth was spherical, but they had misjudged the size of the sphere (thus why Columbus thought he had reached the East Indies, when he had in fact only reached the Bahamas).

I'm biased by the indirect French translation, which uses the world "proved".

Grrr... CK. Your deletion of comments makes it look like I'm talking to myself.

But I don't think he demonstrated it, either. He didn't even cross all the meridians, like Magellan had.

Magellan :-)
Columbus :-(

> The sentence doesn't claim that Columbus was the FIRST person
> to demonstrate this.

If you're going to be like that then _I_ demonstrated the world is not flat. I sat on a beach and watched a ship go over the horizon.

It wasn't the horizon, Paul. The ship was just too far for you to see :-)

> It wasn't the horizon, Paul. The ship was just too far for you to see :-)

*Pfft* Bottom bit goes first, top bit goes last. Either I was watching ships go over the horizon, or every ship that left that port sunk in a terrible tragedy. :-P

You must have been in Bermuda.

I'm tagging this as a "Lie", after all. The world was proven to be round by Magellan, who came *after* Columbus.