Posted by Chris M Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Ripped from the Headlines (100 years ago)

The New York Times has a cool feature where you can read selected old papers online for free (you have to pay to see all the papers). On the front page, 100 years ago (5 January 1910), is a story entitled 'Mother Earth Still Young'. The article gives the details of a lecture by William Morris Davis.
"We are now able to tell almost exactly the age of this earth," said Prof. William Morris Davis of Harvard in a lecture at the Lowell Institute. "It has existed 60,000,000 not 100,000,000 years. We are able to tell this by an examination of the cliffs in Arizona and Utah, where the time taken to lay down deposits can be easily computed."
Sure he was off by roughly 2 orders of magnitude, but he was on the front page!