"Scott Seidman" wrote in message
. 1.4...
"rb608" wrote in news:1166043073.560987.269080@
73g2000cwn.googlegroups.com:

Many of those might believe the earth is flat; but that doesn't mean we
should squander resources teaching it in school.

Turns out that this flat earth thing is a myth, tracable to Washington
Irving's book about Columbus!! By about 50BC, everyone generally believed
that the Earth was spherical.

Actually, the story isn't quite that simple. The flat versus spherical
debate (not to mention infinite variations) raged for a long time. It
certainly IS true that most educated people knew a long time ago that the
question had been settled, but it was by no means a dead issue as late as
the mid-15th century......any more than evolution versus intelligent design
is today. Washington Irving may have popularized the myth about Columbus,
but many of the sailors aboard his vessels undoubtedly had serious concerns
about this spherical Earth "theory."

Incidentally, while Columbus was obviously right about the shape of the
Earth, he was WAY wrong about its size (thus leading him to believe that
he'd arrived at the East Indies).......which had been pretty accurately
estimated by a number of folks centuries earlier.

Wolfgang