The Age of Earth
On January 23rd, 1956, Claire Patterson published his paper ‘Age of meteorites and the Earth’. He measured the age of the meteorites (and therefore that of the earth) to be 4.5 billion years. He did so by measuring the lead concentrations in meteorites compared to the uranium concentrations and extrapolated the numbers given the well known half-lives of these two elements
Source: Patterson, C. Age of meteorites and the earth. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 10, 230–237 (1956).
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Full disclosure, I may occasionally borrow a sentence from Will Durant's Story of Civilization. I absolutely love that collection!