THE FINITE UNIVERSE 



feet or more. 1 One might readily think that waves 

 so different in length, some of them a thousand 

 million times as long as others, would move with 

 different speeds. They do not. Light- waves, heat- 

 waves, electric - waves in brief, all the motions 

 attributed to the ether clip through space at 

 184,000 miles per second. If we could observe a 

 flash of light from Mars, and at the same time hear 

 signals from the Martians by wireless telegraphy, as 

 Marconi heard his signals from across the Atlantic, 

 the two would reach us at the same instant. 



The discovery of electric-waves was made by 

 Hertz, at Carlsruhe, in Germany, in 1888. They not 

 only proved the identity of electricity and light, but 

 went a long way towards making the ether seem 

 something tangible and real. They seemed a sort 

 of demonstration, and to show, too, that this ether, 

 no longer merely lumini-ferous, but electri-ferous 

 as well, is a perfectly uniform substance. 



Then, in 1895, just seven years after, came 

 Professor Rontgen's disturbing discovery of the 

 X-rays. The Hertz- waves had had a sort of Mes- 

 sianic history. They had been foretold. Profes- 

 sor James Clerk- Maxwell had worked out the elec- 

 tromagnetic theory of light mathematically twen- 

 ty-three years before. Hertz's discovery was sim- 



1 See "The World Beyond Our Senses," p. 41. 

 79 



