Hate to disagree, but.
1. Vikings landed on America long before a German.
2. Maybe Phoenicians before them.
3. Indians before them all.
If we’re going to count any/all of things that are loosely described as an airplane, some guy in India may have beat them all.
I think you're kind of missing the point. I'm not saying Dad was right, but the Germans always seemed to have a claim for everything. I used to do the same thing you are. Dad would always tell me that Germans did it. I'd try to argue. Mom would groan. When I got older, I found out the claims were at least plausible enough that a German schoolchild could have learned it that way. That would account for my grandfather filling the head of my father with all this stuff.
In this case, you've got the following
https://www.deseret.com/1998/11/22/19413639/german-mapmaker-discovered-america ". . . America was so named by a German in about 1507, . . . it was a cartographer, . . . who did it. Mapmaker Martin Waldseemuller read a forged letter containing an exaggerated account of explorer Amerigo Vespucci's travels in the New World and drew a map based on this account. The map, a rough outline of South America, was included in his book "Cosmographiae Introductio," which also included the forged letter. He labeled this map "America," feminizing the Latin form of Vespucci's given name, "Americus." Waldseemuller chose the feminine form to be consistent with "Europa" and "Asia," existing Latin names with feminine endings. Geographer Gerhardus Mercator extended the name "America" to include all of the Western Hemisphere.
I tried this schtick on my three sons growing up, and they told me I was full of it.
