The hull is obviously being obscured by curvature, so the earth must be round. When a boat sails off in any direction, he noted, its hull always disappears before its sails do. Two centuries later, Aristotle argued from observation. First the Pythagoreans argued by induction, 2500 years ago: The moon is round, they said. Understanding a round earth came in stages. The ancients thought the earth was flat, but then so did you and I when we were too young to know about spheres. And yet Columbus had access to a much better estimate of earth's size - one that was 1700 years old. A correct calculation would've put it 10,000 miles away - far beyond the reach of any 15th-century ship. He thought Japan lay only 2700 miles west of the Canary Islands. He underestimated earth's diameter, and he overestimated the width of Asia. Actually, his trip was based on a terrible miscalculation. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.Ĭolumbus sailed off, with one part courage and two parts madness, to sail around a spherical world.
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