In 1879, A. A. Michelson made 100 determinations of the velocity of light in air using a modification of a method proposed by the French physicist Foucault. He made the measurements in five trials of 20 measurements each. The observations

(in kilometers per second) follow. Each value has 299,000 substracted from it.

The currently accepted true velocity of light in a vacuum is 299, 792.5 kilometers per second. Stigler (1977, The Annals of Statistics) reports that the “true” value for comparison to these measurements is 734.5. Construct comparative box plots of these measurements. Does it seem that all five trials are consistent with respect to the variability of the measurements?
Are all five trials centered on the same value? How does each group of trials compare to the true value? Could there have been “startup” effects in the experiment that Michelson performed? Could there have been bias in the measuring instrument?

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Trial 1 850 900 930 950 980 1000 930 760 1000 960 740 1070 850 980 880 980 650 810 1000 960 Trial 2 960 960 880 850 900 830 810 880 800 760 940 940 800 880 840 790 880 830 790 800