Ole Christensen Rømer (1644 - 1710) was a Danish astronomer who in 1676 made the first
quantitative measurements of the speed of light. He did this by noticing that the timetable
for the eclipses of the moons of Jupiter were about 1000 seconds late when observed during
a total Solar eclipse. He deduced that this was because under these conditions light had
to travel across the Earth's orbit, a distance of around 186 million miles. Therefore he
calculated that the speed of light was about 186,000 miles per second.
Roughly. Historically correct information should, at some point, replace the above wild
speculation.
One of the Famous People on this site.
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