Global trade, global commerce. The world is connected with living threads of ships and planes and trucks, bringing the goods and services of the world to every corner of the globe. Globalization is the name given to this phenomenon, a phenomenon we now take for granted. But there would be no globalization were there not at least some idea of the globe’s size and nature. Some twenty-two hundred years ago a Greek mathematician accurately calculated the circumference of the earth, and things haven’t been the same since.

 

 

It happened many years ago

Though not so long as these things go

All right it happened back in the BCs

A Greek guy undertook the charge

Of measuring the earth at large

A man whose name was Eratosthenes

It happened that a traveling man

Told our hero that one can

While peering down a well in old Syene

See to the bottom on the day

The sun doth crosseth on its way

A line that girds the earth but can’t be seen

Old Era stood there thunderstruck

For now he knew, a piece of luck

How he could calculate the earth’s true girth

He knew it wouldn’t be so quick

He only had a shadow-stick

But bye and bye he measured out the earth

Now traveling men could surely know

Just how far they had to go

Whenever they set out to go somewhere

And lately men would come to see

That getting stuff for you and me

Required shipping lanes and traveled air

So if you think not knowing what

The earth looks like is something that

Makes not a bit of difference after all

Then think of what our world would be

If our backyard is all we see

We’re lucky God made our fair earth a ball

 

 

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