If electricity had been studied correctly no scientist would ever have imagined that matter was condensed ether. In Maxwell's Elementary Treatise on Electricity on page 49 he says: "WE KNOW ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WITH RESPECT TO THE DISTANCE THROUGH WHICH ANY PARTICULAR PORTION OF ELECTRICITY IS DISPLACED FROM ITS ORIGINAL POSITION." * * * "THE ACTUAL VELOCITY OF ELECTRICITY IN A TELEGRAPH WIRE MAY BE VERY SMALL, LESS, SAY, THAN THE HUNDREDTHS OF AN INCH IN AN HOUR, THOUGH THE SIGNALS WHICH IT TRANSMITS MAY BE PROPAGATED WITH GREAT VELOCITY."
It is the very fact that the ether is not compressible that allows a wireless signal to be given a thousand miles away instantly. It is just the same as if you had a long stick and punched a bell 20 feet away.
I sent my work, "The Latch Key," to Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir William Crookes in 1904. Its philosophy was buried for three years before the ideas were presented to the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Sir William Crookes wrote to me in 1904 stating that he had received my pamphlet, but he was just leaving home for a vacation of two weeks and when he returned he would give it his attention.
In Sir Oliver's great work, called "Life and Matter," he wrote: "But it appears now that an atom may break up into electric charges, and these again may some day be found capable of resolving themselves into pristine ether. In that case the ether alone persists. It is the most fundamental entity."
In another book called "Modern Views of Electricity" he said: "Ether is somehow affected by the immediate neighborhood of gross matter, and it appears to be concentrated inside it to an extent depending on the density of the matter."
So it is seen that Sir Oliver at this time believed that matter was compressed or condensed ether.
In my pamphlets I explained that the ether could not be compressed, as it was capable of passing through all substance, and that matter was not more of the ether, but instead was less, and that atoms were simply spots of pure space or "nothing," and that the ether or its moving lines or sheets simply whirled around on empty space while what was called a vacuum was really the habitat of real material, or the ether.
In 1907 Sir Oliver accepted this new version of the nature of matter, and it was the cause of much excitement in the British Association, so much so that the report reached America and Prof. Serviss wrote an article about it in the Boston Sunday American in October, 1907, in which he says: "The answer as recently given by Sir Oliver Lodge is amazing beyond belief. The solidest thing in existence, he avers, is the very thing which for generations has been universally regarded as the lightest, the most imperceptible, the most utterly tenuous and evanescent beyond all definition or computation—the ether!" And in the same article he says: "Matter, Prof. Osborne Reynolds has asserted, instead of being, as we innocently believe on the evidence of our senses, the only real and solid thing in nature is, in fact, the absence or deficiency of mass."
The following is an article by Sir Oliver Lodge in regard to spirits: