Sep 7, 2017
After Columbus mistakenly discovered the american continent instead of the naval route to india, but was still not aware of his incompetence in calculating the size of the globe, Amerigo Vespucci was able to recognize the error. As a result, the poet Matthias Ringmann mistook him for the discoverer of the new continent. His collegue Martin Waldseemüller then added his annotations to a new carthography, on which he was working at that time. The error spread before it could get corrected.
This lead to an accidental case of fake news, where the speed of distribution trumped the truth: all attempts to rename the continent failed.
No further punchline needed.
