Ussher took on the project of dating the beginning of time when he began writing a detailed history from the moments following the creation to the year 70 AD. It took him more than twenty years to finish his work, researching ancient sources and manuscripts in different languages. He tried to place these different sources, all of which had their own method of counting time, on a common time scale.
He was so thorough in his work that he sent his assistants to the far corners of the earth to search for old books and manuscripts which would help him fill in the missing parts in the chronology he was creating. He also used astronomical charts to reconstruct the dates of important events that took place on the sky, such as solar eclipses, and compared them to the ones described in ancient chronicles. Even though his original intent was to write the history of the ancient times on several thousand pages of dense writing, he went down in history because of that one sentence in his mighty tome in which he determined the date and hour of the beginning of time.
The success of Ussher’s calculations was largely due to the general belief, which was considered to be true for many centuries, that the world was no older than a few thousand years. All that had to be done to determine the time of the creation of the world was to analyze ancient sources or count the number of years that had passed from the birth of some biblical hero or king to the moment his son or daughter was born. It was slightly unusual that some of Adam’s descendants had their first children when they were well over a hundred years old, but the experts of the time simply attributed this oddity to the favorable climate during that golden era of mankind, when there was an abundance of healthy food which enabled people to live longer.
Could the world be older than a few thousand years?
One of the first to determine that the Earth was substantially older than a couple of thousands of years on the basis of accurate scientific experiments was a French scholar called Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Count of Buffon. He was born in the beginning of the eighteenth century and died only a year before the events that marked the French Revolution. His life’s work was also a written account of the history of the world, but unlike Ussher he was not interested in the ancient civilizations but in the natural world. He was only a young man when he became interested in the works of Isaac Newton, which he read and carefully studied in the source language as well. His goal was to apply Newmton’s ideas to the history of the world and nature, to develop a new theory of the creation of the Earth and attempt to date the moment of its creation.
During his youth he traveled extensively across Europe. After his mother’s death in 1732, he took over the family estate and bought a manor which stood on a hill in the center of his home town Montbard. He knew how to invest his money and gradually built a veritable scientific center with botanical gardens and an astronomical observatory in the manor and in its surroundings. He also built an underground laboratory in which he conducted experiments to try and determine the age of the Earth during the following fifteen years.
In his time, Buffon was a very talented, but also extremely hardworking scholar. He knew that success was above all things the result of hard work, so he instructed his servant to wake him up at five o’clock in the morning each day. Because he knew himself well enough to know that it would not be an easy task to get him out of bed this early he promised his servant a reward for each time that he would succeed. Of course, the servant was glad to earn some extra money so he tried all kinds of tricks to wake his master up in the morning. One time, when shouting and other similar methods were ineffective, he poured cold water all over him and Buffon did not fire him, but paid him his bonus as always.
In 1734, his reputation as a scholar earned him a membership in the Academy of Sciences, and five years later he became Keeper of the French King’s Royal Gardens (Jardin du Roi, later Jardin des Plantes) and kept his post until the day he died. The Royal Gardens were not merely a botanical garden, but also one of the leading scientific institutions of the time.
The comet that created the Earth
Buffon’s principal idea about the creation of the Earth, which he pondered his entire life, was based on the development of Newton’s theory that he had described in his Principia. Most of all he found it unusual that all of the planets known at the time orbited around the sun in the same direction and on approximately the same plane. The probability that such an alignment is merely a coincidence is very small. Newton was convinced that planets move in this orderly way because they were set in motion by some intelligent creator of the solar system, but Buffon was not satisfied with this explanation. He wanted to find a natural cause which would explain the order of the planets.
His theory was that planets were created as the result of a collision of a comet with the sun. In the collision, a peace of sun supposedly broke off and shattered, leaving pieces that later came together to form planets. This is how he also explained the orderly movement of planets, which would have been created with a single event that started them off on their orbits around the sun at the same time and in the same direction.
According to Buffon, the Earth was created from a part of the sun, which meant that, at the very beginning, it had to be as hot as the stars. On its journey away from the sun it naturally started to cool down, but the cooling period lasted for a long time. The most interesting thing of all is that this theory enabled him to calculate the approximate time of the creation of the Earth. However, to succeed in this calculation Buffon needed to know how fast scorching hot spheres of different materials would cool down and whether the rate of their cooling depended on their size.
Buffon usually spent his winters in Paris where he kept busy doing administrative work for the Royal Gardens which he supervised, and the summers on his estate where he dedicated most of his time to scientific work. As already mentioned he usually got up at five in the morning and spent an hour answering letters. At six he took a stroll through his gardens to the study where he wrote his books. The records kept by his contemporaries reveal that he was also a man of strange whims. He paid great attention to his personal appearance and supposedly needed the service of a hairdresser up to three times a day, and spent his Sundays promenading through the town clothed according to the latest Parisian fashion.
Cooling balls in the manor’s basements
For a number of years he conducted his famous experiments, in which he timed the rate at which balls of different sizes and materials cooled down, right in the basements of his manor. Strange rumors started spreading about what went on underground as he often invited young girls to take part in his experiments. Buffon skillfully defended his methods before the scrutiny of the villagers by arguing that the young and tender hands of the girls were essential for the successful execution of the experiments as only they were capable of accurately sensing when the balls cooled down to the right temperature.
After years of experiments and calculations, Buffon reached the conclusion that an iron sphere the size of the Earth would require a little less than a hundred thousand years to cool down from the temperature of the sun to the present temperature, which was inconceivably long considering the ideas which held true at the time. Later, he also took into consideration that Earth was not composed solely of iron, so he slightly adjusted his estimate, but it remained substantially larger than that which was officially believed to be true up to that point of time.
Buffon’s writings about the age of the Earth soon reached the theologians at the Sorbonne who demanded that he take back his claims, which he formally did because he did not want to waste time on unimportant disputes. He wrote an explanation saying that he was taking back all of his claims about the age of the Earth which were in opposition with the teachings of the Holy Bible, making it completely clear that his retraction was not really sincere. However, the formal retraction allowed him to keep his prestigious post as Keeper of the Royal Gardens and continue with his research in peace.
In his history of the Earth he also assumed that the planet first cooled down in parts closest to the Earth’s poles. This hypothesis which set the cradle of life on Earth into freezing Siberia delighted the Russian Queen Catherine the Great, who sent Buffon a gift of expensive furs, jewelry and gems as a sign of gratitude. Even though Buffon estimated the age of the Earth at a few tens of thousands of years in his books, in his private notes he considered the possibility that the world was even much older. In the end, he reached the estimate of several millions of years which was no more heretical than a few tens of thousands of years, but he did not have enough solid evidence to support his claims, so he decided not to publish them. Despite the fact that Buffon was still very far from the present estimate of the age of the Earth which amounts to 4.5 billions of years, his innovative approach to calculating the age of the world by means of experimentation started an important era in the history of science when geology was one of the principal disciplines of all science and lead to some of the most surprising and shocking discoveries.
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