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Bishop Ussher
James Usher used a combination of religious sources and secular historians to construct his chronology. 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. -
Thomas Brunet's Sacred Theory of the Earth
Based on Burnet's interpretations of observations on the presumption that the Biblical flood account is true. The earth is hollow to hold the water needed for the flood. Oceans and mountains were formed during the flood. -
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Benoit de Maillet
Maillet argued that the oceans have been slowly retreating, that the crust's features show slow development by natural process. Maillet estimated the age of the earth to be 2 billion years old. -
Georges Buffon
Buffon made measurements based on a ball of cooling iron to estimate the earth as 70 thousand years old. -
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Charles Lyell
Lyell argued that apparently sudden transitions in fossil strata are due to evidence being eroded away. He reasoned that current geological process are continuous, and that the earth's being incredibly old explains it appearance. This agrees with James Hutton argument in 1795 that there is no way of knowing how old the earth is because of uniformitarianism. -
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Lord Kelvin **
Lord Kelvin believed that the earth was slowly cooling. Link text -
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Radioactivity **
How the discovery of radioactivity affected the calculations of the age of the earth. Link text -
John Joly
Physicist John Holy calculated the age of the earth to be 89 million years old based on the rate of accumulation of sodium in the oceans.
