Speed of light with their product equalling "c". In 1983 the metre was defined as "the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of of a second", fixing the value of the speed of light at by definition, as described below. Consequently, accurate measurements of the speed of light yield an accurate realization of the metre rather than an accurate value of "c". Outer space is a convenient setting for measuring the speed of light because of its large scale and nearly perfect vacuum. Typically, one measures the time needed for light to traverse some reference distance
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