Who said earths shape was elliptical?

Answer 1

That was Bernard the Fool in 13th Century Dubrovnik. Nobody paid any attention to him, because

he didn't know what he was talking about. He only changed his theory to "elliptical" after he spent

thirty years insisting that earth was shaped like a pyramid, and nobody listened to him then either.

Nobody with any intelligence ever suggested that the earth's shape was elliptical. What they did

say is elliptical is earth's orbit around the sun. That was Johannes Kepler. After he spent years

going over Tycho's notebooks of planetary observations, Kepler realized that everything we

actually see in the sky can be neatly explained if the planets move in elliptical orbits, and if

the earth is just another one of the planets.