You’re on a giant sphere 8,000 miles (12,700 kilometers) in diameter that spins at about 1,000 miles (1,700 kilometers) per hour as it orbits the sun at 67,000 miles (107,000 kilometers) per hour. But you can’t tell by looking. To you, it feels like you live on a flat, motionless plane where the sun and stars move overhead but you stay safe and stationary. It took us centuries of scientific research to break ourselves out of that pleasant illusion, and we did it all before the first spacecraft ever left the atmosphere. How? Human ingenuity. In the case of learning that the Earth rotates, that ingenuity came from a 32-year-old medical school dropout.

— Read on curiosity.com/topics/how-did-people-know-the-earth-rotates-before-space-travel-curiosity