1900's Science and Technology | The Velocity of Light

Monograph

By: Albert A. Michelson

Date: 1902

Source: Michelson, Albert A. The Velocity of Light. Vol. 9 of The Decennial Publications. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1902, 7–9.

About the Author: Albert Abraham Michelson (1852–1931) was born in what is today Germany. He immigrated with his family to Panama, then to San Francisco. In 1873 he graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, where he stayed to teach physics. In 1881 he resigned from the navy to accept a professorship at the Case Institute of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1907 he became the first American to win a Nobel Prize in physics.

Introduction

In the seventeenth century Isaac Newton passed white light through a prism, refracting it into a spectrum of colors. Light, he reasoned, must consist of particles of different sizes, with each size corresponding...