Light travels at a blistering speed; a light beam can race seven times round the world in a
second! But if light's so fast, how do we know this? How can we measure its speed at all?
Speed is how far something travels in a certain time so, if you lived a few hundred years ago
and you could only measure time accurately to seconds or minutes, you'd need to time light
making a very long journey to calculate its speed accurately. That's why the first measurements
of the speed of light were made by observing various astronomical phenomena.
Artwork: How Fizeau measured the speed of light.
Then, in the middle of the 19th century, French physicist Armand Hippolyte Louis Fizeau figured
out a way to measure the speed of light on Earth. He shone a beam of light (1) at a half-silvered
mirror (2) so it bounced through a wheel rotating hundreds of times per second (3). Like a gear,
the wheel had teeth cut into its edge and the light shot through one of them. Fizeau arranged for
a mirror (4) to be positioned about 8.5km (5 miles) away from his apparatus so the light hit it and
bounced back the same way, coming back through it (5) and into a telescope through which he
was looking (6). He knew how far the light beam had traveled, so all he had to measure was
how long it took. The rotating gear wheel was effectively his clock: knowing how many teeth it
had and how fast it was spinning, he could adjust its speed until it just blocked out the light from
the far mirror. At that point, he knew that the light beam had traveled only once from his lamp to
the mirror and back again (a distance he had measured), and he also knew how much time had
elapsed between the light beam departing and coming back again. So all he had to do was
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divide the distance by the time to calculate the speed of light. His figure was about 3.1 × 10 m/s,
which was about 5 percent too high—but a very impressive result.
Fizeau's apparatus was later improved by Léon Foucault, who replaced the gear wheel with a
spinning mirror. This more accurate technique enabled him to measure the speed of light as
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2.98 × 10 m/s, which is less than 1 percent off the value we use today.
The School Physics website has a great page about measuring the speed of light, showing how
Fizeau and Foucault made their measurements and the calculations they used, and how even
more accurate results were later obtained by American physicist Albert Michelson.