17/11/2017 Eratosthenes - Wikipedia

Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth

without leav ing Egy pt. He knew that at local noon on the
summer solstice in Sy ene (modern Aswan, Egy pt), the Sun
was directly ov erhead. (Sy ene is at latitude 2405 North,
near to the Tropic of Cancer, which was 2342 North in
100 BC[16]) He knew this because the shadow of someone
looking down a deep well at that time in Sy ene blocked the
reflection of the Sun on the water. He measured the Sun's
angle of elev ation at noon on the same day in Alexandria.
The method of measurement was to make a scale drawing
of that right triangle with the v ertical rod and its shadow
Illustration showing a portion of the globe showing
as its legs and to measure the acute angle subtending to
a part of the African continent. The sunbeams
the shadow. This turned out to be about 7 , or 1/50th of shown as two rays hitting the ground at Syene and
the way around a circle. Taking the Earth as spherical, and Alexandria. Angle of sunbeam and the gnomons
knowing both the distance and direction of Sy ene, he (vertical pole) is shown at Alexandria, which
concluded that the Earth's circumference was fifty times allowed Eratosthenes' estimates of radius and
circumference of Earth.
that distance.

1.
His knowledge of the size of Egy pt was founded on the work of many generations of surv ey ing trips. Pharaonic
bookkeepers gav e a distance between Sy ene and Alexandria of 5,000 stadia (a figure that was checked
y early ). [17] Some say that the distance was corroborated by inquiring about the time that it took to trav el from
Sy ene to Alexandria by camel. Carl Sagan said that Eratosthenes paid a man to walk and measure the distance (ht
tps://www.y outube.com/watch?v =mUxmCXSmtVo&t=3m15s). Some claim Eratosthenes used the Oly mpic
stade of 17 6.4 m, which would imply a circumference of 44,100 km, an error of 10%, [17] but the 184.8 m Italian
stade became (300 y ears later) the most commonly accepted v alue for the length of the stade, [17] which implies a
circumference of 46,100 km, an error of 15%. [17] It was unlikely , ev en accounting for his extremely primitiv e
measuring tools, that Eratosthenes could hav e calculated an accurate measurement for the circumference of the
Earth. He made fiv e important assumptions (none of which is perfectly accurate):[17][18]

1. That the distance between Alexandria and Syene was 5000 stadia,
2. That Alexandria is due north of Syene
3. That Syene lies on the Tropic of Cancer
4. That the Earth is a perfect sphere.
5. That light rays emanating from the Sun are parallel.
Eratosthenes later rounded the result to a final v alue of 7 00 stadia per degree, which implies a circumference of
252,000 stadia, likely for reasons of calculation simplicity as the larger number is ev enly div isible by 60. [17] In
2012, Anthony Abreu Mora repeated Eratosthenes's calculation with more accurate data; the result was
40,07 4 km, which is 66 km different (0.16%) from the currently accepted polar circumference of the Earth. [18]

Sev enteen hundred y ears after Eratosthenes's death, while Christopher Columbus studied what Eratosthenes had
written about the size of the Earth, he chose to believ e, based on a map by Toscanelli, that the Earth's
circumference was one-third smaller. Had Columbus set sail knowing that Eratosthenes's larger circumference
v alue was more accurate, he would hav e known that the place that he made landfall was not Asia, but rather the
New World. [19]

"Father of geography"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes 3/9