Christopher Columbus A lot of the stories regarding Christopher Columbus are not true, but most importantly, he did not discover that the earth was round and he did not have to convince the Spaniards that he would not fall off the face of the earth on his attempted voyage to Asia. The Greeks already knew that the earth was round about two thousand years before Spain even existed. The Spaniards didn't want to fund Columbus's trip because he was severely underestimating the size of the earth. In short, they thought he was an idiot. Archduke Ferdinand It is commonly thought that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the catalyst for starting World War One. While Gavrild Princhip did shoot the Archduke. His actions were simply the final straw in a war that was a long time coming. While no historians can actually pinpoint the exact cause of world war One. They do agree that entangled alliances of Western Europe and Pan-slavism in the East may have set the entire war in motion.