Eratosthenes measured the size of Earth by using the Sun's angles, as well as a bit of geometry.
The used an orange
Eratosthenes of Cyrene 3rd century
He or She estimated it by building off of Henry Cavendish,Galileo,& Sir Isaac Newtons Ideas.
In addition to correctly determining the size of the Earth and finding correct methods for determining the size of the Moon and the distance to the Moon and Sun, he was the head of the largest library in the western world (Alexandria in northern Egypt) and must have had many students.
Eratosthenes was an ancient Greek philosopher who devised a way to measure the size of the earth. He noted the time when the sun shone straight down a deep well in Egypt, and how long it took before the sun was directly overhead at another location, and then had a runner estimate the distance between the two locations. He knew what fraction of a day the difference in time represented, and he knew that the measured distance was the same fraction of the earth's circumference. I don't know what number he came up with, but considering the methods he used, he was surprisingly close to the accurate answer. Notice that although he was working a couple of thousand years ago, he was assuming a spherical earth, not a flat earth.
Eratosthenes
The used an orange
The used an orange
Eratosthenes
Eratosthenes
Eratosthenes of Cyrene 3rd century
Eratosthenes is famous for making the first good measurement of the size of the Earth. He lived from 276 to 194 B.C. and died in Alexandria at age 82. He was rumored to have starved himself to death after going blind.
Columbus said the earth was sphere when he traveled to America
He or She estimated it by building off of Henry Cavendish,Galileo,& Sir Isaac Newtons Ideas.
Eratosthenes of Cyrene. He did it by measuring the size of shadows at different locations on the planet and was right to within a few percent.
Ancient Greeks such as Aristotle recognized that Earth and the Moon are spheres, and understood the phases of the Moon, but because of their inability to detect stellar parallax, they rejected the idea that Earth moves. Eratosthenes measured the size of Earth with surprising precision.
He was an ancient Greek mathematician of the 2nd/3rd century BC, as well as a poet, geographer, musical composer, scholar, and astronomer. He was the first Greek to estimate the circumference and tilt of the earth. He created a map of the earth based on the knowledge available at the time. He was highly respected, and his calculations of the earth's circumference were used for hundreds of years. Today, his method for finding prime numbers from 1-100 is known as the 'Sieve of Eratosthenes' and is taught in math textbooks.