Reply #67: Most educated people at the time knew that the earth was a sphere and about 24,000 miles around.

[Odin2005]

The notion that most people then thought the earth was flat is one of those idiotic things they brainwash into kids' heads in order to make Columbus look like some sort of hero against "Medieval ignorance". The reason He was laughed out of most of the royal courts is because most of then knew that his calculations of the Earth's diameter was bogus and that sailing West to China was suicidal (people assumed there was no land in the way) with the sailing technology at the time because the distance was to long. It was the less educated court of Spain that fell for Columbus's nonsense.