Speed of light special theory of relativity, in which the speed of light in vacuum "c" featured as a fundamental constant, also appearing in contexts unrelated to light. This made the concept of the stationary aether (to which Lorentz and Poincaré still adhered) useless and revolutionized the concepts of space and time. In the second half of the 20th century much progress was made in increasing the accuracy of measurements of the speed of light, first by cavity resonance techniques and later by laser interferometer techniques. These were aided by new, more precise, definitions of the metre and second. In 1950, Louis Essen
Rømer's determination of the speed of light this time with the benefit of more than a century of increasingly precise observations, the astronomer Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre (1749–1822) reported the time for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth as 8 minutes 12 seconds. Depending on the value assumed for the astronomical unit, this yields the speed of light as just a little more than 300,000 kilometres per second. The first measurements of the speed of light using completely terrestrial apparatus were published in 1849 by Hippolyte Fizeau (1819–96). Compared to values accepted today, Fizeau's result (about 313,000 kilometres per second) was too high, and