Dr. Thomas Madden

In fact, he used it as an analogy that you could come to the truth by different means.

So for the globe, he says, you know, everyone knows it's a ball.

But you can do this either by astronomy, by seeing the shadow of the Earth on the moon during the eclipse, or you could do it by the fact that gravity always goes straight down rather than off to a side, which it would if it was flat.

So it's been commonly known that the myth comes...

In part, it's related to the Galileo myth, but it's basically this idea that Protestants developed much later that the church was directly opposed to reason and that the only way that they were able to keep power during the Middle Ages was by keeping people stupid and that when the Protestants came in, they accepted reason and the church fought against it.

And so they said that the world was flat.

That then got morphed into Columbus.

So you had, it's really, it's interesting.

The big proponent of this was Washington Irving, who was an American author.

He wrote Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

But he wrote a history of Columbus that,

And in his romantic retelling of it, he has Columbus meeting with all the Catholic scholars at the University of Salomonica and saying that the world is flat.

If you sail, you'll sail off of it.

And Columbus saying, no, the world is round.

And Columbus never said anything of the sort because everyone knew that the world was round.

No, Columbus said that the world was small.

and that he could get to Asia because it was very small.

He was wrong, but that's what he said.

Yeah, and one of the ways that was, yeah, and that's true.

They would do that sometimes where they would put fires on the ship, on the masts, and then watch.