List of common misconceptions
Christopher Columbus's efforts to obtain support for his voyages were not hampered by a European belief in a flat Earth. Sailors and navigators of the time knew that the Earth was like a sphere, but (correctly) disagreed with Columbus's estimate of the distance to India, which was approximately one-sixth of the actual distance. The intellectual class had known that the Earth was spherical since the works of the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Eratosthenes made a very good estimate of the Earth's diameter around 240 BC.