Historical Perspectives on the Age of the Earth

By jpbard

  • Bishop James Ussher

    The Anglican Bishop published a 1600 page work titled "The Annals of the World" where he used very literal readings of the Bible to determine the date of the creation of the world to be October 23, 4004 B.C.
  • Period: to

    Benoit de Maillet

    Estimated the Age of the Earth to be 2 billion years old.

  • Georges Buffon

    Used measurements on a ball of cooling iron to estimate the earth as 70 thousand years old.

  • Lord Kelvin

    Modeled the earth as a cooling molten core to calculate the age of the earth to be between 20-400 million years old. His formal estimate was 98 million years.

  • George Arthur Holmes

    Used radiometric dating to calculate the age of the earth to be between 1.6 and 3 billion years. Published this in "The Age of the Earth, an Introduction to Geological Ideas."