Never Mind the Bullocks, Here's the Science by Karl Kruszelnicki Page B

denied the globe, and a few others were ambiguous or uninterested in the question. But nearly unanimous scholarly opinion pronounced the Earth spherical, and by the Fifteenth Century all doubt had disappeared.’
    In fact, Dr Russell found that the myth was started in the 1830s by a Frenchman and an American, acting independently. One was anti-Church, the other anti-British.
    The Frenchman was Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787-1848), an antireligious academic of great renown. He wrote On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers in 1834, in which he deliberately misrepresented medieval Christians as being scientifically ignorant. His supposed proof for this claim was that they believed in a Flat Earth. But this was untrue—they did not believe in a Flat Earth. (Mind you, in Galileo’s time, the Church persecuted him for advancing a model of the Universe without the Earth at its centre.)
    The American whom Dr Russell refers to started his myth-making six years earlier than Antoine-Jean Letronne. He wasWashington Irving (1783-1859), who wrote his history of Christopher Columbus in 1828.
Microsoft and Flat Earth
According to the online BBC News Magazine, Microsoft used the Flat Earth metaphor in an advertisement in mid-2008.
‘Depicting an olden-days ship sailing on rough seas, presumably heading towards the “edge of the world”, the advert is part of a $300m campaign aimed at rescuing the reputation of Windows Vista by comparing its critics to flat-earthers.’
    Why Rewrite History?
    The year 1828 was a good time for Americans to revisit their European history—and rewrite or, at the very least, change its emphasis.
    Around this time, the British were quite adamant that it was a Brit, Sebastian Cabot (c. 1476-c. 1557), who first made landfall in North America.
    This could almost be correct, if you ignore the Scandinavians, who got there a few centuries before Cabot. You also have to ignore the fact that Cabot claimed (depending on whom he was speaking to) that he was born in England, or in Venice—so he may not have been British at all. In 1497, Sebastian may (or may not) have travelled with his father, John Cabot, on the ship Matthew , under the patronage of the English King Henry VII, to North America. The ship made landfall on 24 June, somewhere around southern Labrador, or Newfoundland, or Cape Breton Island. They believed that they had landed in China.
    This British claim rankled with the Americans, who were not especially friendly with the British at that time. (There was that little matter of the War of 1812 between the USA and Great Britain, which lasted from 1812 to 1815.) So it made sense to shift the emphasis to Columbus ‘discovering’ North America.
    This was the beginning of the reinvention of Columbus as the Mighty Discoverer of America. In truth, Columbus, in all of his four voyages, had never set foot on the North American continent. The closest he had come to the mainland was some small islands in the (West) Indies, well off the coast.
    But Who’s the Man to Do It?
    This was very good timing for the American author Washington Irving. He was probably the first American author to earn his living entirely from writing and one of the first who was confident enough to place the locations of his stories in the USA, rather than Europe. He wrote for the person in the street, rather than for the academic. His stories, written in the vernacular, were intended to entertain, rather than to enlighten. For this reason, his stories ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ and ‘Rip van Winkle’ were wildly successful with the general public.
    In 1826, while he was in Paris, he received a letter from Alexander Everett, the US Minister to Spain, inviting him to Madrid. A huge archive of documents relating to Columbus had been painstakingly assembled over a period of more than 35 years, and they were about to be published—in Spanish. Everett suggested that Irving translate these into English, for American readers.
    Irving