[hprotagonist]

It’s always kind of wonderful to read older texts. For one, the style is often much more approachably clear; for another, sometimes you find hidden gems of history.

One of my favorite bits of science history is the first edition of a text on metallurgy, that was meant for sales reps for a carnegie steel affiliate company.

The purpose of the book was to give sales reps enough clue to not embarrass themselves; it’s evolved and the book, now in its 8th edition or something, is a standard reference text for undergraduates.

Anyway the first chapter or so of the 1914 text was explaining the basic chemistry of the universe and went something like:

The three things that make up our physical universe are: matter, which is stuff that has mass; energy, which is the capacity to do work; and the luminiferous aether, which is the medium through which light propagates...

[mjklin]

I’ve been reading a lot of H.G. Wells’ nonfiction. As a child in a one-room English schoolhouse, he was still being taught the four “elements” of earth, water, fire, and air. Aristotle would be proud!

[hprotagonist]

but everything changed when the martians attacked.

[commandlinefan]

And in a lot of cases, they don’t assume you already know xxx because it was new then.

[qubex]

I think you mean luminiferous aether, unless there’s a pun in there I’m not getting.

[kwhitefoot]

Ether is a perfectly valid spelling in British English. See meaning 3 at https://www.lexico.com/definition/ether.

[Aloha]

Its valid in American English too, frankly and see it used frequently.

Out of the ether, Ethernet and so on.

[m463]

so either aether or ether. :)

We take the name ethernet for granted now, but it really is quite a clever name.

nowadays it is practically just a point-to-point network, but the original implementation was a bunch of clients connected to their private "aether" all shouting out to each other.

[Aloha]

What is the name of text on metallurgy?