Excerpt from The Mechanics of Electricity
When asked what electricity is, physicists a few years ago would reply, "We do not know," and the inquirer was made to feel that he had asked a foolish question. To Maxwell, electricity itself seems to have been rather an abstraction, and he occupied himself chiefly with its effects, or the strains it produces in dielectrics. To the ultra-Maxwellians who declare that "there is no such thing as electricity," it is a disembodied spirit, not necessarily connected with matter except in so far as this is necessary to render its effects observable.
The general consensus of opinion at present is that electricity is something. Lodge writes, "Electricity may possibly be a form of matter - it is not a form of energy. We have nowhere asserted that electricity and the ether are identical. If they are, we are bound to admit that the ether, though fluid in the sense of enabling masses to move freely through it, has a certain amount of rigidity for enormously rapid and minute oscillatory disturbances. Is the ether electricity then? I do not say so, neither do I think that in that coarse statement lies the truth; but that they are connected there can be no doubt."
Clausius surmised that electricity might be the ether, and if we may judge from certain passages the surmise amounted to a belief. This belief was, of course, not based upon any direct proof, for that is hardly possible, but was rather of the nature of an intuition. He seems to have been alone in this opinion.
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