<div class="quoteheader"><div class="topslice_quote"><a href="https://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=266078.msg13148376#msg13148376">Quote from: Honeycrisp on 24-04-2017, 01:43:52</a></div></div><blockquote class="bbc_standard_quote">Google, yo.  (:  You don't think I knew all that on my own, did you?<br/><br/>Honestly, how did people write before the internet and make their words so rich without having anything you wanted to know at your fingertips? <br/></blockquote><div class="quotefooter"><div class="botslice_quote"></div></div><br/>You've heard of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  League is a horizontal unit of measure, or at least, so I'm told.  It should be called 20,000 Fathoms Under the Sea.<br/><br/>If you took that measurement and stretched it vertically, it's over six times the diameter of Earth.  People have known just how big the Earth was (and that it was circular) since at least Ancient Egypt.  Christopher Columbus figured that he could circle around the long way to India, crossing both the Pacific AND the Atlantic ocean.  While theoretically possible, it would have taken freaking forever, and they'd have run out of supplies well before reaching India.<br/><br/>To answer your question, when writers didn't know something, it wasn't uncommon for people just to make it up, and often be very wrong.  However, the rest of the world didn't know it was wrong either, so it didn't really matter.