A friend did a subject at university called something like "The history of science" where they studied and recreated tons of early experiments and measurements like this. I remember they did another one to calculate the mass of earth based on the deviation of a weighted string.
The idea was that if anyone is ever going to "discover" new things in the future, they'll have to use out of the box thinking and measurement techniques to get there.
Another awe-inspiring experiment that can be done in a basement or high school lab is to show that gravity really does exist between everyday ordinary objects. You'd think that any demonstration of gravity has to involve the Earth or Earth-size objects. Showing that two bowling balls attract seems impossibly difficult. But it can be done:
"The [experiment above] demonstrates universal gravitation with an apparatus which could have been conceived by Archimedes and built from materials he could readily obtain [during the time Archimedes lived 2200 years ago]."
The idea was that if anyone is ever going to "discover" new things in the future, they'll have to use out of the box thinking and measurement techniques to get there.