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Originally Posted by towny
Galileo, I think, using the motion of Jupiter's moons. Apparently his initial calculations were reasonably accurate.
EDIT Or was it Newton?
Some brainy classical dude with a telescope, anyway.
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Galileo tried and failed using two people with lanterns a mile apart
Roemer used Jupiters moons, but didn't have accurate distances so got it as 200,000Km/s
In 1958 Froome used a microwave interferometer and a Kerr cell shutter to measure the speed of light to be 299,792.5 km/s.
These days we define a meter as 1/299,792,458 the distance light travels in one second.
In A level physics, you can get away with using 3x10^8m/s