The shape of the Earth , our home, has preoccupied humanity for quite some time. Today, all students have no doubt that the planet is spherical. But the truth is that until reaching such a discovery there were several men who tried to show that the Earth was not flat as was believed in ancient times, let us know then who discovered that the Earth was round.
Who discovered that the Earth was round?
The idea that humans long imagined the Earth to be a flat object is widely accepted. Perhaps it is primarily to prejudge the interest that early men had in the shape of the Earth they walked on. Perhaps he is also neglecting the fairly solid empirical knowledge in geometry and astronomy that the Egyptians, for example, had been able to acquire. Knowledge that suggests that they very well could have considered the Earth as round .
Others also evoke the possibility of a round Earth already described in the Bible , citing as proof some verses that, read with the filter of our current knowledge, could resemble a very modern description of our Planet. The Hebrew prophet Isaiah, for example, refers to the “circle of the Earth,” sometimes translated as “the globe” or “the roundness of the Earth.”
It was not until Galileo (from 1564 to 1642) when one began to think that the earth is really round, although we must clarify that it was not this who discovered the true shape of the Earth, but that he must be recognized for having defended the theory of the heliocentrism something for which the Italian scientist was condemned by the Inquisition . His theory went against the Church which claimed that the Earth, and not the Sun, was at the center of our Universe.
The first proofs attributed to Aristotle
However, it seems that Thales of Miletus (-625 to -547) was the first to really ask the question of the shape of the Earth and after this it was Pythagoras (-580 to -495) and Plato (-428 to -348) who give it a spherical shape considered more rational. And finally Aristotle (from -384 to -322) was the one who provided some first observational evidence of this, from the rounded shape of the Earth’s shadow on the Moon during eclipses . A fact that at the time did not really seem to shock your world.
We must wait for Eratosthenes (from -276 to -194) who was the first to measure the circumference of the Earth . This mathematician and astronomer had noticed that at noon on the day of the summer solstice, there was no shadow near Aswan. Measuring the shadow of a stick planted in Alexandria at the same time and knowing the distance that separates the two cities, he deduced the circumference of the Earth with quite astonishing precision: 39,375 kilometers against about 40,000 kilometers of current estimates, thus demonstrating that the Earth It is round.
