Was actually noted by William Gilbert, Physician to Queen Elizabeth 1st back in the 1600's when he wrote the first text modelling the Earth's magnetic field to an internal bar magnet - "De Magnete".

Since then, many people commented on the fit, as maps were published with more continents on them. All were dismissed as crazy ideas by the geologists of the time.

For a while in the 1960's the Expanding Earth model had some currency - to explain rifting and seperation of the continents by a single episode of Post-Jurassic inflation of the whole Earth and tearing apart of its continents, but the idea failed for several fundamental reasons:-

1) No tear marks on the Moon

2) where was the ocean before the continents rifted? - in theory all land should have been flooded, but we know it wasn't from numerous dinosour fossils, coal deposits etc.

3) How to explain previous continental movements

4) Why things would start in the Jurassic. If they didn't, the Earth would have been the size of a pea when it first formed, and would collapse into a black hole

5) To get out of (4) you need to invoke mass creation within the Earth but why only the Earth? If the sun had experienced same growth, it would explode. If Moon had, it would have tear marks

6) Magnetic polar-wander curves showed that movement was not pure expansion and included areas of convergence

7) Plate tectonics works SO much better.