Electrical Experimenter
233 FULTON STREET, NEW YORK
Publisht by Experimenter Publishing Company, Inc. (H. Gernsback, President; S. Gernsback, Treasurer; R. W. DeMott, Sec'y;)
233 Fulton Street, New York.
Vol. VII. Whole No. 80
(Table of Contents)
THOMAS A. EDISON SPEAKS TO YOU...... Contents for December, 1919. Front Cover From a painting by Harold Brown TRAINING WOMEN SUB-STATION OPERATORS... No. 8 770
THE AMATEUR MAGICIAN, by Joseph H. Kraus, Jr......... SUBMARINES TO SALVAGE SUNKEN SHIPS. SHIPS GUIDED BY ELECTRIFIED CABLE. DID THE ROMANS HAVE "WIRELESS"?. 745 746 747
THOMAS A. EDISON SPEAKS TO YOU-SPECIAL INTERVIEW. 748 By H. Gernsback.
SLOW MOVIES ANALYZE MOTION..
MYSTERIES OF STAGE-CRAFT, by H. Winfield Secor.
AN AERIAL PASSENGER ROCKET..
AN "OSCILLATING" SCENIC RAILWAY AIRPLANE SUPER-CHARGER FOR HIGH-FLYING. By Charles M. Ripley.
SOUND AND FLASH RANGING IN THE A.E.F.. By Prof. Augustus Trowbridge, Princeton University.
ROHLFS FLIES 34,610 FEET-NEW WORLD'S RECORD. NEW YORK ELECTRICAL SHOW. PIEZO-ELECTRICITY OR "SPEAKING CRYSTALS" By A. McL. Nicolson.
LATEST ELECTRIC NOVELTIES. BEAUTY BY THE KILOWATT... STUCCOING HOUSES BY ELECTRICITY. 751 752 754 756 757 758 760 761 762 765 766 767
POPULAR ASTRONOMY IS THE MOON A DEAD WORLD?... 768 By Isabel M. Lewis, M.Α.
THE CONSTRUCTOR DEPARTMENT-ELECTRIC CHRISTMAS VILLAGE, by Fred F. Phillips PHOTOGRAPHIC EXPERIMENTS, by Marion B. Reynolds.
THE "FINER WORKINGS" OF STATIC ELECTRICITY. By Frederick Von Lichtenow.
THE ELECTRICAL MACHINIST, by H. Winfield Secor.
"HOW-TO-MAKE-IT" PRIZE CONTEST WRINKLES, RECIPES AND FORMULAS, by S. Gernsback.
CARNARVON RADIO STATION. MODERN AMERICAN RADIO APPARATA. THE PLIOTRON FAMILY CALCULATION OF TREE WAVE LENGTHS By A. N. Tenna.
RADIO GUIDES SHIPS THRU FOG. LOCATING SUBMARINE BY AUDION SYPHONING. By Edward T. Jones, A.M.I.R.E.
LATEST PATENTS DIGEST.. "WITH THE AMATEURS" LABORATORY PRIZE CONTEST... SCIENCE IN SLANG-"JUICING THE JAZZ WAGON" By Emerson Easterling.
THE ORACLE.
EDITORIAL Ether and Space OR thousands of years it was an establisht fact that the earth stood still, with the sun, moon and stars revolving around it. All known evidence, visual and otherwise, supported the "fact." But humanity with its deceptive senses had been fooled for generations, until the "establisht fact" was disproved by one Galileo, who brought very convincing proofs that it was the sun that stood still. Since Euclid, down to a very few years ago, scientists thought that light was always propagated along absolutely straight lines. Einstein, however, showed an astonished world that a ray of light may be curved considerably. Indeed, we appear to have proofs to support him. Again, for over one hundred years we have accepted unhesitatingly Faraday's teachings that the whole universe is permeated with a very tenuous and exceedingly fine substance, the ether. Faraday and Maxwell, in order to explain the wave theory of light and other electromagnetic waves, invented the ether, as they reasoned that you cannot have waves without a suitable medium in which to vibrate these waves. The ether, accordingly, is a substance so fine, so minute, that it permeates and fills not only the entire universe but all other substances. It fills the space between atoms in metals and all other solids or fluids ; in short, it is everywhere. It was reasoned that the ether must have elastic, jelly-like material properties in order to explain many mystifying phenomena, but nothing of the actual structure of the ether is known. But now Einstein and his followers come along and flatly deny all existence of the ether. In their support tion. Indeed, all recent researches along this line tend to show that light is material. We know for instance that the sunlight exerts a pressure of many thousand tons upon the surface of the earth upon which it falls. This is termed the pressure of light. But can you exert pressure upon a body unless the light which exerts it has "body"; in other words, is material? Then, too, if a light ray is deflected in a gravitational field, it certainly must be material. Once arrived on these premises let us see how space looks to our mental eye, robbed of its hypothetical ether. We will now have a vast vacuum, nothing but a vacuum at a temperature of-273° Fahrenheit. But how can a light ray, or a radio ray (wave) cross this bottomless void? An analogy may perhaps help here. Imagine a man stationed out in space shooting a stream of a non-freezing liquid earthward from a fire-hose. Suppose he vibrates (shakes) the nozzle back and forwards slightly. This would impart to the liquid stream a wave motion the same as we know a light ray has. There being no friction, the wave motion of the liquid stream would persist till the stream reaches the earth's atmosphere, where it would break up into drops. Now we have seen that given a material stream we need no medium such as the ether to hurl it earthward. If, then, light and other electromagnetic waves are material, we no longer require the ether to explain the wave motion. We can even explain how it comes that the intensity of light ght diminishes inversely as the square of its distance. If a light ray is material-let us say composed of electrons we can conceive how, thru it must be said that there are no experimental proofs of the existence of the ether. The ether, in short, is only a theory, which was never proved-but so far also never entirely disproved. If a light ray is material, the ether is no longer required to explain its propagaThe ELECTRICAL EXPERIMENTER is publisht on the 15th of each month at 233 its terrific speed of 186,000 miles per second, a certain quantity of electrons are lost continuously in space during its course. These electrons would probably be flipped off from the crests of the wave. The next decade will no doubt shed further "light" on the question. H. GERNSBACK. 771 772 773 774 775 776 777 778 779 780 781 782 783 784 785 786