Before you ask, no I didn’t have any encounters with people who claimed Earth was flat. I’m just curious.
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The way some people learned was seeing a lunar eclipse. In a lunar eclipse, the Earth’s shadows reflects off the moon and when people saw it they figured out the Earth was round. Not sure the exact date but definitely the BC years.
While it was common knowledge by 1500, an official proof was a Spanish explorer named Magellan circumnavigated, or sailed around the Earth.
Another commonly recognized method for discovering the Earth’s roundness was a discovery in Ancient Greece around 500 BC. A scholar named Eratosthenes, he heard of a city (Syene) where on the summer solstice, when the sun was directly above the Earth, and he wanted to see if where he was the same would happen. However when he placed a stick in the center of the city, he found a 7.2 degree angle of shadow. If the Earth was flat, and the sun was directly overhead, because the sun is bigger than Earth, then the whole world would have no shadow. So he discovered that the Earth had to be round in order for the sun to have a shadow during the summer solstice.
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