J.J. Thomson Science lecturers who traveled from town to town in the middle nineteenth century delighted audiences by showing them the ancestor of the neon sign. They took a glass tube with wires embedded in opposite ends . . . put a high voltage across . . . pumped out most of the air . . . and the interior of the tube would glow in lovely patterns. In 1859 a German physicist sucked out still more air with an improved pump and saw that where this light from the cathode reached the glass it produced a fluorescent glow. Evidently the cathode emitted some kind of ray that was illuminating the glass. What could these rays be? One possibility was that they were waves traveling in a hypothetical invisible fluid called the ether (similar to the quintessence of Aristotle). At that time, many physicists thought that this ether was needed to carry light waves through....

Number Of Pages: 5

Number Of Words: 1315

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