September 7, 2025 • 20 mins
The History of Flat Earth
For most of human history, people have looked up at the sky, down at the ground, and wondered what exactly they were standing on. The idea of a flat Earth wasn’t just a quirky belief, it was the dominant worldview for centuries. In this episode, we’ll explore how ancient cultures imagined the Earth’s shape, why the flat Earth stuck around so long, and how it eventually gave way to the round planet model we take for granted today. And yes, we’ll also take a peek at the modern-day flat Earth revival, because apparently some ideas never quite die.
New Episodes: Mon/Wed/Fri
(If people enjoy, and feedback via reviews and ratings is good, will release daily)
Request an episode: thehistoryoftheemail@gmail.com
The History Of is your daily dose of weird, wonderful, and occasionally ridiculous history. Each episode takes one topic an object, a place, a job, a trend and unpacks the surprising story behind it. No homework, no boring lectures, just history you’ll actually want to share.
A podcast for all ages, if you enjoy please share it and leave a review because that tells me you want more.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-history-of--6664775/support.
For most of human history, people have looked up at the sky, down at the ground, and wondered what exactly they were standing on. The idea of a flat Earth wasn’t just a quirky belief, it was the dominant worldview for centuries. In this episode, we’ll explore how ancient cultures imagined the Earth’s shape, why the flat Earth stuck around so long, and how it eventually gave way to the round planet model we take for granted today. And yes, we’ll also take a peek at the modern-day flat Earth revival, because apparently some ideas never quite die.
New Episodes: Mon/Wed/Fri
(If people enjoy, and feedback via reviews and ratings is good, will release daily)
Request an episode: thehistoryoftheemail@gmail.com
The History Of is your daily dose of weird, wonderful, and occasionally ridiculous history. Each episode takes one topic an object, a place, a job, a trend and unpacks the surprising story behind it. No homework, no boring lectures, just history you’ll actually want to share.
A podcast for all ages, if you enjoy please share it and leave a review because that tells me you want more.
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-history-of--6664775/support.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Hello, and welcome to the History of the show for
anyone who flunked history but still wants to impress at
Trivia Night. Each day we take one topic, an object,
a place, a job, a trend, and uncover the weird, messy,
and sometimes ridiculous truth behind it. No homework, just history
you'll actually want to tell people about. Ready, let's get
(00:30):
into it. The history of flat Earth. Long before anyone
took a compass to see or looked through a telescope,
humans were already imagining the shape of the world beneath
their feet. If you had asked someone in the deep
past what the Earth looked like, the answer would probably
have been simple and confident. Flat not because people were foolish,
(00:55):
but because it was a perfectly reasonable conclusion from daily life.
Then beneath you does not curve, Lakes do not slide
off into space. When you look to the horizon, the
world seems to stretch out like a broad floor. To
an early observer with no reason to suspect otherwise, the
Earth felt like a vast level stage built for human life,
(01:15):
and the sky was a ceiling that kept the universe
in order. Many of the first flat Earth models were
woven from mythology and survival rather than any systematic science.
In Mesopotamia, some of the earliest written records describe a
world that was a flat disc floating on water. The
Babylonians pictured the sky as a dome, like a great
(01:35):
upside down bowl, covering a circular land mass. Beyond the
edges of that land lay the cosmic sea, which fed
the rivers and mark the boundaries of the known world.
This was not idle speculation. It matched how they traveled.
The land seemed endless until a river or the sea
stopped them. Stories of monsters at the edges and a
(01:56):
vault of heaven above helped make sense of lightning, eclipses,
and the stars. In ancient Egypt, geography was also folded
into cosmology. The world was imagined as a flat expanse
of land, with the heavens arched over it, upheld by
the god's shoe. The sky goddess Nut bent overhead like
a protective canopy, and the sun god Ra, sailed across
(02:16):
her belly each day in his boat. Beneath the land
was a watery underworld that connected to the Nile and
the oceans beyond. To Egyptians, the world was orderly, cyclical
and horizontal. It did not need to be a sphere,
because life itself moved in straight lines sunrise to sunset,
flood to harvest, life to death, and back again. Far
(02:37):
to the north, Norse mythology gave the world a rugged
and dramatic flat earth design. According to the Eddas, the
earth was a disk surrounded by a great ocean, with
the serpent Yorman gander coiled around its edges. The sky
was a dome made from the skull of the primordial
giant Emir, held up by four dwarfs, named after the
cardinal directions. Beyond the boundaries of the known world lay
(03:00):
danger and mystery, from the icy lands of Jotunheim to
the fiery realm of Muspelheim. The edge of the world
was not just a physical boundary, but a narrative one
where heroes, gods, and monsters clashed. For seafaring cultures, the
horizon was both a promise and a threat. These models
were not scientific in the modern sense, but they were functional.
(03:22):
They told people how to navigate their lives and offered
stories to explain the unknown, and in fairness, they fit
what could be observed without advanced tools. Stand in a
flat field and look around. The Earth does not appear
to curve, walk in any direction, and you do not
feel yourself tilting. A flat world was the natural, intuitive answer.
(03:43):
The first real challenge to that intuition came from the
thinkers of ancient Greece. By around the sixth century BCE,
some philosophers began to propose that the Earth might actually
be a sphere. Pythagoras, the mathematician and mystic, is often
credited with the early idea. He believed spheres were the
most perfect form in nature, and since the heavens showed
(04:04):
circular motions, perhaps the Earth itself was also round. This
was as much philosophical as observational, but it was the
beginning of a new way to imagine the planet. Evidence
began to build by the time of Aristotle in the
fourth century BCE. Arguments for a spherical Earth were grounded
in observation. Aristotle noted that during a lunar eclipse, the
(04:25):
shadow of the Earth on the Moon was always round,
which would only make sense if the Earth itself was
a sphere. Travelers also noticed that ships disappeared hull first
over the horizon, and that new stars became visible as
one moved south. These were subtle clues, but they pointed
to curvature. The Earth was revealing its roundness to those
who paid close attention. The most famous early proof came
(04:48):
from Aritosthenes in the third century BCE. He was a
librarian in Alexandria who combined curiosity with clever geometry. He
had heard that at noon in the city of Sienn
the sun shone to directly down a deep well with
no shadow, while in Alexandria on the same day shadows
still fell at an angle. By measuring that angle and
(05:09):
knowing the distance between the two cities, Eretosenes calculated the
circumference of the Earth with remarkable accuracy. His experiment not
only demonstrated the planet's roundness, but also gave it a
measurable size in one stroke. The old flat disc models
were dethroned among serious scholars. Even with this growing body
of knowledge, flat earth ideas did not vanish overnight. They
(05:32):
remained embedded in cultural and religious imagination. People still told
stories of edges and cosmic oceans because those stories were meaningful, comforting,
and easy to visualize. The spherical earth was more abstract
and for people who rarely traveled beyond a few dozen
miles from home, the practical difference was negligible. Yet in
(05:52):
the realm of educated thought, the ball had rolled decisively
toward roundness. By late antiquity, Greek and Roman scholars largely
accepted the spherical earth, and the concept would be carried
forward through the Islamic Golden in Age and into medieval Europe.
The ancient era of flat Earth belief is a reminder
that science grows out of experience and imagination. People were
(06:15):
not clinging to ignorance. They were building models of the
world that fit the evidence available to them. The earth
felt flat, so they said it was flat. The oceans
seemed to end in the horizon's edge, so they imagined
edges guarded by serpents or waterfalls. And when the first
careful observers began to notice the small betrayals of curvature
in shadows, horizons, and stars, they started a chain reaction
(06:38):
that would reshape human understanding forever. The flat Earth of
the ancient world is gone, but its echoes remain in
the stories, maps, and myths that have survived. It was
the first stage in a long journey from a world
of edges and oceans to a planet that curves beneath
our feet and spins through space. By the early medieval period,
the Earth was already round in the mina of most
(07:00):
educated people. That may come as a surprise because popular
culture loves to imagine a world where everyone in the
Middle Ages thought they would sail off the edge of
the map. The truth is more nuanced and frankly more entertaining.
Flat earth thinking lingered in art, stories and popular imagination,
but in the universities, monasteries, and royal courts, the sphere
(07:22):
had quietly won. The transition between the fall of the
Western Roman Empire and the rise of medieval Europe did
slow the spread of scientific knowledge. Libraries shrank, scholars scattered,
and literacy rates dipped, but the concept of a spherical
earth survived, carried forward in the writings of late Roman
and early Medieval scholars like Macrobius and Isidore of Seville. Isidore,
(07:45):
a seventh century and cyclopodist, compiled a vast work called
the Etymologia. It included a description of the Earth as
a globe, but his accompanying diagrams, known as T and
O maps, painted a picture that could be mistaken for flat.
These maps showed a circular world divided into three land masses, Asia, Europe,
and Africa, separated by a tea of water, the Mediterranean,
(08:07):
the Nile, and the Don Rivers. The o was the
encircling Ocean. The maps were symbolic rather than navigational. They
were meant to illustrate a Christian worldview, with Jerusalem often
at the center and Paradise placed somewhere in the east.
If you held one of these maps in your hands,
it looked like a pizza of faith and geography, and
it certainly did not scream globe. To a casual observer.
(08:31):
This reinforced the image of a flat world, but the
scholars who drew them could simultaneously understand that the Earth
was spherical. They were simplifying for theological illustration, not rewriting physics.
During the medieval period, there were still a few fringe
figures who either misunderstood or rejected the round Earth, but
they were exceptions rather than the rule. The majority of
(08:53):
medieval scholars who studied the heavens accepted that the Earth
was a sphere, largely thanks to the enduring influence of
Aristotle and Ptolemy. Monastic schools in Europe preserved and copied
classical texts. Islamic scholars across the Mediterranean and the Middle
East not only preserved Greek astronomy but expanded on it,
calculating the Earth's circumference with impressive accuracy. The great Persian
(09:18):
scholar Albiruni in the eleventh century made calculations using the
height of mountains and the angle of the horizon, arriving
at numbers very close to those of Eritosthenes nearly fourteen
hundred years earlier. Yet, despite this widespread acceptance among the learned,
the flat earth refused to die in the public imagination.
Part of this was simple human nature. People living in
(09:40):
rural villages with no exposure to seafaring or advanced geometry
relied on direct experience. The ground still looked flat, the
horizon still seemed like an edge. Folklore often ignored the
finer points of scholarly debate. Storytellers passed down tales of
cosmic oceans, world spanning trees, and montster lurking at the
(10:00):
ends of the earth. Medieval bestiaries and travelogs sometimes played
into these ideas, describing fantastical lands at the edge of
the known world, where people had dogheads or feet so
large they could be used as umbrellas. The age of
exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries brought all of
this into sharp focus. As European powers ventured farther from
(10:23):
their coasts, they encountered both the practical reality of a
spherical Earth and the limits of their maps. Christopher Columbus
is often mistakenly credited with proving that the Earth was round,
but this is a simplification invented long after the fact.
Educated Europeans already knew the Earth was a sphere. The
real debate was over its size. Columbus believed it was
(10:46):
smaller than most scholars estimated, which is why he thought
he could reach Asia quickly by sailing west. His calculations
were wrong, and the Americas interrupted his plan, but the
voyages themselves were not acts of flat Earth defiance. As
exploration advanced, so did observational evidence. Sailors had long noticed
(11:06):
that ships vanished over the horizon hull first, and that
distant mountains or coasts seemed to rise from the sea
as one approached. During circumnavigations like Magellan's expedition in the
early fifteen hundreds, the roundness of the Earth was demonstrated
beyond any doubt. If you can start in Spain, sail
west and eventually return to Spain from the east, the
(11:26):
argument for flats becomes a bit hard to defend. Even so,
popular imagination lagged behind maps. With elaborate sea monsters and
warnings of the unknown continued to decorate charts well into
the sixteenth century. The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries further buried the flat earth concept under layers of
(11:46):
observation and math. Telescopes, better star charts, and Newtonian physics
provided a clear framework for understanding the Earth as a
sphere in motion. Sailors could navigate with greater confidence, and
astronomers could predict eclipses and planetary motions using models that
assumed a globe. The gap between scholarly consensus and folk
(12:07):
imagery became starker. Ordinary people might still picture a world
with edges because that was the story that felt familiar,
while intellectuals were busy calculating orbital mechanics. Ironically, the enduring
myth that medieval people believed in a flat Earth was
popularized not in the Middle Ages, but in the nineteenth
century writers, eager to portray the medieval period as an
(12:29):
age of ignorance, exaggerated the persistence of flat earth belief
to create a simple before and after narrative, the dark
Ages versus the bright light of scientific progress. Schoolbooks repeated
the idea that everyone feared falling off the edge before Columbus,
cementing it as a story more powerful than the historical truth.
By the end of the Enlightenment, the Earth's shape was
(12:51):
no longer up for debate in any serious scientific or
navigational context. Global trade, circumnavigation, and increasingly precis vi ice
measurements had all but erased practical doubts. What lingered was
more about imagery and memory than reality. Medieval maps and
stories gave the illusion of a flat world, and later
(13:12):
generations found it too entertaining to correct. The period from
five hundred CE to the seventeen hundreds shows a fascinating
split between perception and knowledge. Scholars could trace the curve
of the Earth with stars and shadows, while villagers and
storytellers held on to edges, oceans, and dragons. The world
itself did not change shape, but the human story about
(13:34):
it evolved slowly curving toward the globe we now take
for granted. By the nineteenth century, the idea of a
flat Earth should have been a closed chapter in human history.
Science had mapped the globe, measured its circumference, and even
begun to grasp the laws of motion that kept planets
spinning in space. But just as the leech made a
surprise return to modern hospitals, the flat earth found a
(13:57):
second life, though for very different reasons. This revival was
not driven by necessity or tradition. It was a mixture
of spectacle, stubbornness, and the timeless human talent for questioning everything,
even when the answer is sitting right in front of you.
The revival can be traced to an Englishman named Samuel Roboom.
(14:17):
In the eighteen forties, Robotom began conducting experiments on the
Old Bedford River in Cambridgeshire, a six mile stretch of straight,
t calm water that seemed ideal for testing the curve
of the Earth. His logic was simple. If the Earth
was truly a globe, the water should curve downward over distance,
and distant objects should disappear from view. He took a telescope,
(14:39):
lined it up low to the water and claimed that
a boat moving away from him remained visible much farther
than round Earth math would predict. To him, this was
proof that the planet was flat. Roboom did not stop
at experiments. He launched a career as a lecturer and
pamphleteer under the name Parallax, spreading what he called the
(15:00):
zetetic method, a system of inquiry that rejected traditional scientific
authority in favor of direct personal observation. His ideas found
a small but enthusiastic audience in a world experiencing the
upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of mass media,
and growing skepticism of established institutions. Robotham's defiance of conventional
(15:21):
science resonated with people who felt alienated from the new
modern order. After his death, the movement he spark did
not entirely fade. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
the belief coalesced into what became the Flat Earth Society,
formally organized in nineteen fifty six under Samuel Shenton in
the United Kingdom. By then, humanity had taken photographs of
(15:44):
Earth from high altitude, balloons and rockets were on the horizon.
None of that shook the core believers. Instead, they leaned
into a familiar psychological pattern. If evidence contradicts the belief,
the evidence must be suspect. Shenton and his followers argued
that photos of a round Earth were manipulated or misunderstood,
(16:05):
a theme that would become the backbone of modern conspiratorial thinking.
In the mid twentieth century, the Flat Earth Society became
both a curiosity and a cultural punchline. Charles K. Johnson,
who took over the organization in the nineteen seventies from
his home in California, leaned into the role of friendly contrarian.
He and his wife ran the society by mail, sending
(16:27):
newsletters and responding to inquiries from the genuinely curious and
the politely amused. To the broader public, flat earth belief
was an eccentric hobby, like collecting UFO reports or claiming
to see Elvis at the supermarket. It was fringe, but
it was also oddly charming in its persistence. Then the
twenty first century arrived, and the Internet transformed a niche
(16:49):
eccentricity into a global phenomenon. Platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and
later TikTok created an environment where any idea, no matter
how thoroughly debunked, could find a community and an audience.
A few Flat Earth videos, mixing slick graphics with appeals
to common sense, went viral. Algorithms did the rest, feeding
viewers in endless stream of related content. Suddenly, a belief
(17:12):
that had limped along for decades on newsletters and small
conventions was trending online, sparking debates, mockery, and fascination. Modern
flat Earth believers often combine their views with other conspiracies.
The basic argument goes like this, governments, scientists, and space
agencies are all in on a massive lie to conceal
the truth about our world. The reasons vary depending on
(17:36):
the storyteller. Some claim it is to hide the existence
of God or a cosmic ice wall. Others say it
is a scheme for control, power or money. In all cases,
the flat Earth narrative feeds on a profound distrust of
authority and a belief that seeing is believing, even when
human senses are famously easy to fool. Pop culture responded
in predictable fashion documentaries and late night hosts leaned into
(17:59):
the absurdity memes featuring cats knocking things off the supposed
edge of the world spread across social media. Flick's documentary
Behind the Curve introduced mainstream audiences to modern flat earth culture,
capturing its mix of sincere belief and unintentional comedy. Fans
and critics alike could not look away. The idea had
become self aware, part conspiracy, part entertainment, and part social commentary.
(18:24):
Despite the humor, the persistence of flat earth belief tells
us something important about human psychology. People are drawn to
narratives that make them feel special, in the know and
in control of a confusing world. Believing that you see
through a grand deception offers a sense of power. It
also provides community. Online groups, conventions, and forums let believers
(18:46):
share their doubts, experiments, and memes in a space where
they feel understood. The Internet has turned a lonely, marginal
belief into a social phenomenon. Flat Earth today occupies a
strange space between genuine conviction and eyes ironic participation. Some
people are true believers, constructing homemade experiments and posting videos
(19:06):
challenging astronomy. Others treated as a joke, a way to
troll friends or poke fun at the very idea of
conspiracy culture. The line between earnest and playful is blurry,
which is part of why the topic refuses to die
as a meme. Flat Earth has achieved immortality. It appears
in cartoons, stand up routines, and even marketing campaigns. The
(19:27):
very phrase flat earther has become shorthand for wilful ignorance
or creative contrarianism. Yet beneath the jokes lies a reminder
of the same human impulses that once inspired myths of
world encircling oceans and sky holding giants. People crave stories
that simplify a complicated universe, even if that simplicity requires
ignoring the obvious. In the end, the journey of flat
(19:49):
earth belief is a circle, which is ironic given the
shape it denies. It began as a natural assumption in
a world without instruments or maps. It faded under the
weight of observation and exit bluration. It was resurrected as
an act of rebellion against modernity, then reimagined as Internet
culture turned even the most outdated ideas into viral entertainment.
(20:10):
The Earth is round, but the story of flat Earth
keeps looping back, proving that no amount of evidence can
completely extinguish a story that scratches the human itch for mystery, belonging,
and the occasional laugh at the edge of reason.
Hello, and welcome to the History of the show for
anyone who flunked history but still wants to impress at
Trivia Night. Each day we take one topic, an object,
a place, a job, a trend, and uncover the weird, messy,
and sometimes ridiculous truth behind it. No homework, just history
you'll actually want to tell people about. Ready, let's get
(00:30):
into it. The history of flat Earth. Long before anyone
took a compass to see or looked through a telescope,
humans were already imagining the shape of the world beneath
their feet. If you had asked someone in the deep
past what the Earth looked like, the answer would probably
have been simple and confident. Flat not because people were foolish,
(00:55):
but because it was a perfectly reasonable conclusion from daily life.
Then beneath you does not curve, Lakes do not slide
off into space. When you look to the horizon, the
world seems to stretch out like a broad floor. To
an early observer with no reason to suspect otherwise, the
Earth felt like a vast level stage built for human life,
(01:15):
and the sky was a ceiling that kept the universe
in order. Many of the first flat Earth models were
woven from mythology and survival rather than any systematic science.
In Mesopotamia, some of the earliest written records describe a
world that was a flat disc floating on water. The
Babylonians pictured the sky as a dome, like a great
(01:35):
upside down bowl, covering a circular land mass. Beyond the
edges of that land lay the cosmic sea, which fed
the rivers and mark the boundaries of the known world.
This was not idle speculation. It matched how they traveled.
The land seemed endless until a river or the sea
stopped them. Stories of monsters at the edges and a
(01:56):
vault of heaven above helped make sense of lightning, eclipses,
and the stars. In ancient Egypt, geography was also folded
into cosmology. The world was imagined as a flat expanse
of land, with the heavens arched over it, upheld by
the god's shoe. The sky goddess Nut bent overhead like
a protective canopy, and the sun god Ra, sailed across
(02:16):
her belly each day in his boat. Beneath the land
was a watery underworld that connected to the Nile and
the oceans beyond. To Egyptians, the world was orderly, cyclical
and horizontal. It did not need to be a sphere,
because life itself moved in straight lines sunrise to sunset,
flood to harvest, life to death, and back again. Far
(02:37):
to the north, Norse mythology gave the world a rugged
and dramatic flat earth design. According to the Eddas, the
earth was a disk surrounded by a great ocean, with
the serpent Yorman gander coiled around its edges. The sky
was a dome made from the skull of the primordial
giant Emir, held up by four dwarfs, named after the
cardinal directions. Beyond the boundaries of the known world lay
(03:00):
danger and mystery, from the icy lands of Jotunheim to
the fiery realm of Muspelheim. The edge of the world
was not just a physical boundary, but a narrative one
where heroes, gods, and monsters clashed. For seafaring cultures, the
horizon was both a promise and a threat. These models
were not scientific in the modern sense, but they were functional.
(03:22):
They told people how to navigate their lives and offered
stories to explain the unknown, and in fairness, they fit
what could be observed without advanced tools. Stand in a
flat field and look around. The Earth does not appear
to curve, walk in any direction, and you do not
feel yourself tilting. A flat world was the natural, intuitive answer.
(03:43):
The first real challenge to that intuition came from the
thinkers of ancient Greece. By around the sixth century BCE,
some philosophers began to propose that the Earth might actually
be a sphere. Pythagoras, the mathematician and mystic, is often
credited with the early idea. He believed spheres were the
most perfect form in nature, and since the heavens showed
(04:04):
circular motions, perhaps the Earth itself was also round. This
was as much philosophical as observational, but it was the
beginning of a new way to imagine the planet. Evidence
began to build by the time of Aristotle in the
fourth century BCE. Arguments for a spherical Earth were grounded
in observation. Aristotle noted that during a lunar eclipse, the
(04:25):
shadow of the Earth on the Moon was always round,
which would only make sense if the Earth itself was
a sphere. Travelers also noticed that ships disappeared hull first
over the horizon, and that new stars became visible as
one moved south. These were subtle clues, but they pointed
to curvature. The Earth was revealing its roundness to those
who paid close attention. The most famous early proof came
(04:48):
from Aritosthenes in the third century BCE. He was a
librarian in Alexandria who combined curiosity with clever geometry. He
had heard that at noon in the city of Sienn
the sun shone to directly down a deep well with
no shadow, while in Alexandria on the same day shadows
still fell at an angle. By measuring that angle and
(05:09):
knowing the distance between the two cities, Eretosenes calculated the
circumference of the Earth with remarkable accuracy. His experiment not
only demonstrated the planet's roundness, but also gave it a
measurable size in one stroke. The old flat disc models
were dethroned among serious scholars. Even with this growing body
of knowledge, flat earth ideas did not vanish overnight. They
(05:32):
remained embedded in cultural and religious imagination. People still told
stories of edges and cosmic oceans because those stories were meaningful, comforting,
and easy to visualize. The spherical earth was more abstract
and for people who rarely traveled beyond a few dozen
miles from home, the practical difference was negligible. Yet in
(05:52):
the realm of educated thought, the ball had rolled decisively
toward roundness. By late antiquity, Greek and Roman scholars largely
accepted the spherical earth, and the concept would be carried
forward through the Islamic Golden in Age and into medieval Europe.
The ancient era of flat Earth belief is a reminder
that science grows out of experience and imagination. People were
(06:15):
not clinging to ignorance. They were building models of the
world that fit the evidence available to them. The earth
felt flat, so they said it was flat. The oceans
seemed to end in the horizon's edge, so they imagined
edges guarded by serpents or waterfalls. And when the first
careful observers began to notice the small betrayals of curvature
in shadows, horizons, and stars, they started a chain reaction
(06:38):
that would reshape human understanding forever. The flat Earth of
the ancient world is gone, but its echoes remain in
the stories, maps, and myths that have survived. It was
the first stage in a long journey from a world
of edges and oceans to a planet that curves beneath
our feet and spins through space. By the early medieval period,
the Earth was already round in the mina of most
(07:00):
educated people. That may come as a surprise because popular
culture loves to imagine a world where everyone in the
Middle Ages thought they would sail off the edge of
the map. The truth is more nuanced and frankly more entertaining.
Flat earth thinking lingered in art, stories and popular imagination,
but in the universities, monasteries, and royal courts, the sphere
(07:22):
had quietly won. The transition between the fall of the
Western Roman Empire and the rise of medieval Europe did
slow the spread of scientific knowledge. Libraries shrank, scholars scattered,
and literacy rates dipped, but the concept of a spherical
earth survived, carried forward in the writings of late Roman
and early Medieval scholars like Macrobius and Isidore of Seville. Isidore,
(07:45):
a seventh century and cyclopodist, compiled a vast work called
the Etymologia. It included a description of the Earth as
a globe, but his accompanying diagrams, known as T and
O maps, painted a picture that could be mistaken for flat.
These maps showed a circular world divided into three land masses, Asia, Europe,
and Africa, separated by a tea of water, the Mediterranean,
(08:07):
the Nile, and the Don Rivers. The o was the
encircling Ocean. The maps were symbolic rather than navigational. They
were meant to illustrate a Christian worldview, with Jerusalem often
at the center and Paradise placed somewhere in the east.
If you held one of these maps in your hands,
it looked like a pizza of faith and geography, and
it certainly did not scream globe. To a casual observer.
(08:31):
This reinforced the image of a flat world, but the
scholars who drew them could simultaneously understand that the Earth
was spherical. They were simplifying for theological illustration, not rewriting physics.
During the medieval period, there were still a few fringe
figures who either misunderstood or rejected the round Earth, but
they were exceptions rather than the rule. The majority of
(08:53):
medieval scholars who studied the heavens accepted that the Earth
was a sphere, largely thanks to the enduring influence of
Aristotle and Ptolemy. Monastic schools in Europe preserved and copied
classical texts. Islamic scholars across the Mediterranean and the Middle
East not only preserved Greek astronomy but expanded on it,
calculating the Earth's circumference with impressive accuracy. The great Persian
(09:18):
scholar Albiruni in the eleventh century made calculations using the
height of mountains and the angle of the horizon, arriving
at numbers very close to those of Eritosthenes nearly fourteen
hundred years earlier. Yet, despite this widespread acceptance among the learned,
the flat earth refused to die in the public imagination.
Part of this was simple human nature. People living in
(09:40):
rural villages with no exposure to seafaring or advanced geometry
relied on direct experience. The ground still looked flat, the
horizon still seemed like an edge. Folklore often ignored the
finer points of scholarly debate. Storytellers passed down tales of
cosmic oceans, world spanning trees, and montster lurking at the
(10:00):
ends of the earth. Medieval bestiaries and travelogs sometimes played
into these ideas, describing fantastical lands at the edge of
the known world, where people had dogheads or feet so
large they could be used as umbrellas. The age of
exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries brought all of
this into sharp focus. As European powers ventured farther from
(10:23):
their coasts, they encountered both the practical reality of a
spherical Earth and the limits of their maps. Christopher Columbus
is often mistakenly credited with proving that the Earth was round,
but this is a simplification invented long after the fact.
Educated Europeans already knew the Earth was a sphere. The
real debate was over its size. Columbus believed it was
(10:46):
smaller than most scholars estimated, which is why he thought
he could reach Asia quickly by sailing west. His calculations
were wrong, and the Americas interrupted his plan, but the
voyages themselves were not acts of flat Earth defiance. As
exploration advanced, so did observational evidence. Sailors had long noticed
(11:06):
that ships vanished over the horizon hull first, and that
distant mountains or coasts seemed to rise from the sea
as one approached. During circumnavigations like Magellan's expedition in the
early fifteen hundreds, the roundness of the Earth was demonstrated
beyond any doubt. If you can start in Spain, sail
west and eventually return to Spain from the east, the
(11:26):
argument for flats becomes a bit hard to defend. Even so,
popular imagination lagged behind maps. With elaborate sea monsters and
warnings of the unknown continued to decorate charts well into
the sixteenth century. The Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries further buried the flat earth concept under layers of
(11:46):
observation and math. Telescopes, better star charts, and Newtonian physics
provided a clear framework for understanding the Earth as a
sphere in motion. Sailors could navigate with greater confidence, and
astronomers could predict eclipses and planetary motions using models that
assumed a globe. The gap between scholarly consensus and folk
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imagery became starker. Ordinary people might still picture a world
with edges because that was the story that felt familiar,
while intellectuals were busy calculating orbital mechanics. Ironically, the enduring
myth that medieval people believed in a flat Earth was
popularized not in the Middle Ages, but in the nineteenth
century writers, eager to portray the medieval period as an
(12:29):
age of ignorance, exaggerated the persistence of flat earth belief
to create a simple before and after narrative, the dark
Ages versus the bright light of scientific progress. Schoolbooks repeated
the idea that everyone feared falling off the edge before Columbus,
cementing it as a story more powerful than the historical truth.
By the end of the Enlightenment, the Earth's shape was
(12:51):
no longer up for debate in any serious scientific or
navigational context. Global trade, circumnavigation, and increasingly precis vi ice
measurements had all but erased practical doubts. What lingered was
more about imagery and memory than reality. Medieval maps and
stories gave the illusion of a flat world, and later
(13:12):
generations found it too entertaining to correct. The period from
five hundred CE to the seventeen hundreds shows a fascinating
split between perception and knowledge. Scholars could trace the curve
of the Earth with stars and shadows, while villagers and
storytellers held on to edges, oceans, and dragons. The world
itself did not change shape, but the human story about
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it evolved slowly curving toward the globe we now take
for granted. By the nineteenth century, the idea of a
flat Earth should have been a closed chapter in human history.
Science had mapped the globe, measured its circumference, and even
begun to grasp the laws of motion that kept planets
spinning in space. But just as the leech made a
surprise return to modern hospitals, the flat earth found a
(13:57):
second life, though for very different reasons. This revival was
not driven by necessity or tradition. It was a mixture
of spectacle, stubbornness, and the timeless human talent for questioning everything,
even when the answer is sitting right in front of you.
The revival can be traced to an Englishman named Samuel Roboom.
(14:17):
In the eighteen forties, Robotom began conducting experiments on the
Old Bedford River in Cambridgeshire, a six mile stretch of straight,
t calm water that seemed ideal for testing the curve
of the Earth. His logic was simple. If the Earth
was truly a globe, the water should curve downward over distance,
and distant objects should disappear from view. He took a telescope,
(14:39):
lined it up low to the water and claimed that
a boat moving away from him remained visible much farther
than round Earth math would predict. To him, this was
proof that the planet was flat. Roboom did not stop
at experiments. He launched a career as a lecturer and
pamphleteer under the name Parallax, spreading what he called the
(15:00):
zetetic method, a system of inquiry that rejected traditional scientific
authority in favor of direct personal observation. His ideas found
a small but enthusiastic audience in a world experiencing the
upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of mass media,
and growing skepticism of established institutions. Robotham's defiance of conventional
(15:21):
science resonated with people who felt alienated from the new
modern order. After his death, the movement he spark did
not entirely fade. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
the belief coalesced into what became the Flat Earth Society,
formally organized in nineteen fifty six under Samuel Shenton in
the United Kingdom. By then, humanity had taken photographs of
(15:44):
Earth from high altitude, balloons and rockets were on the horizon.
None of that shook the core believers. Instead, they leaned
into a familiar psychological pattern. If evidence contradicts the belief,
the evidence must be suspect. Shenton and his followers argued
that photos of a round Earth were manipulated or misunderstood,
(16:05):
a theme that would become the backbone of modern conspiratorial thinking.
In the mid twentieth century, the Flat Earth Society became
both a curiosity and a cultural punchline. Charles K. Johnson,
who took over the organization in the nineteen seventies from
his home in California, leaned into the role of friendly contrarian.
He and his wife ran the society by mail, sending
(16:27):
newsletters and responding to inquiries from the genuinely curious and
the politely amused. To the broader public, flat earth belief
was an eccentric hobby, like collecting UFO reports or claiming
to see Elvis at the supermarket. It was fringe, but
it was also oddly charming in its persistence. Then the
twenty first century arrived, and the Internet transformed a niche
(16:49):
eccentricity into a global phenomenon. Platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and
later TikTok created an environment where any idea, no matter
how thoroughly debunked, could find a community and an audience.
A few Flat Earth videos, mixing slick graphics with appeals
to common sense, went viral. Algorithms did the rest, feeding
viewers in endless stream of related content. Suddenly, a belief
(17:12):
that had limped along for decades on newsletters and small
conventions was trending online, sparking debates, mockery, and fascination. Modern
flat Earth believers often combine their views with other conspiracies.
The basic argument goes like this, governments, scientists, and space
agencies are all in on a massive lie to conceal
the truth about our world. The reasons vary depending on
(17:36):
the storyteller. Some claim it is to hide the existence
of God or a cosmic ice wall. Others say it
is a scheme for control, power or money. In all cases,
the flat Earth narrative feeds on a profound distrust of
authority and a belief that seeing is believing, even when
human senses are famously easy to fool. Pop culture responded
in predictable fashion documentaries and late night hosts leaned into
(17:59):
the absurdity memes featuring cats knocking things off the supposed
edge of the world spread across social media. Flick's documentary
Behind the Curve introduced mainstream audiences to modern flat earth culture,
capturing its mix of sincere belief and unintentional comedy. Fans
and critics alike could not look away. The idea had
become self aware, part conspiracy, part entertainment, and part social commentary.
(18:24):
Despite the humor, the persistence of flat earth belief tells
us something important about human psychology. People are drawn to
narratives that make them feel special, in the know and
in control of a confusing world. Believing that you see
through a grand deception offers a sense of power. It
also provides community. Online groups, conventions, and forums let believers
(18:46):
share their doubts, experiments, and memes in a space where
they feel understood. The Internet has turned a lonely, marginal
belief into a social phenomenon. Flat Earth today occupies a
strange space between genuine conviction and eyes ironic participation. Some
people are true believers, constructing homemade experiments and posting videos
(19:06):
challenging astronomy. Others treated as a joke, a way to
troll friends or poke fun at the very idea of
conspiracy culture. The line between earnest and playful is blurry,
which is part of why the topic refuses to die
as a meme. Flat Earth has achieved immortality. It appears
in cartoons, stand up routines, and even marketing campaigns. The
(19:27):
very phrase flat earther has become shorthand for wilful ignorance
or creative contrarianism. Yet beneath the jokes lies a reminder
of the same human impulses that once inspired myths of
world encircling oceans and sky holding giants. People crave stories
that simplify a complicated universe, even if that simplicity requires
ignoring the obvious. In the end, the journey of flat
(19:49):
earth belief is a circle, which is ironic given the
shape it denies. It began as a natural assumption in
a world without instruments or maps. It faded under the
weight of observation and exit bluration. It was resurrected as
an act of rebellion against modernity, then reimagined as Internet
culture turned even the most outdated ideas into viral entertainment.
(20:10):
The Earth is round, but the story of flat Earth
keeps looping back, proving that no amount of evidence can
completely extinguish a story that scratches the human itch for mystery, belonging,
and the occasional laugh at the edge of reason.
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