Word: michelson
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...Michelson and Morley raced two beams of light against each other with an interferometer (a light splitter). The beams were at right angles. Idea was that if the earth, in its revolution around the sun, was actually traveling through a sea of ether, the effect of ether-drag should perceptibly slow up one of the beams. But the two beams finished th-e race practically neck & neck. This looked like a mortal wallop for the ether theory. Einstein's Relativity theories (1905-15) seemed another deadly stroke, for they dispensed with the ether as unnecessary. In the relativistic view...
Four years before, a homely, dark-eyed, colorless girl named Fanny Kaplan stepped up to Lenin when he finished speaking at Michelson's factory in Moscow, shot him in the lungs and neck. On the eve of the second All Union Congress, Lenin died, the conflicting groups he had held together split apart...
...Henderson then was on his way out of crumbling NRA, which he had served as director of Research and Planning, chief economist, member of its short-lived National Industrial Recovery Board. He subsequently fell so low that in 1936 he had to ask Democratic Press-agent Charlie Michelson for a $50-a-week job with the Democratic National Campaign Committee in Manhattan...
...late great Albert Abraham Michelson, in his final experiments, reflected light back & forth ten times in a mile-long vacuum tube from the faces of a rapidly spinning, 3 2-sided mirror. Velocity measurements completed by his successors after Michelson's death yielded an average figure of 186,270.75 miles per second. But in individual runs there were unexplained, periodic variations up to twelve miles a second. At first this caused excitement over possibility that the speed of light might not be constant (TIME, Dec. 25, 1933). The clamor was quieted by attributing the variations to "experimental error...
...apparatus for refining measurements of light's speed still further. It is compact enough to be housed in a small laboratory room and hallway, it eliminates friction as a source of error, and the measurement is automatic-that is, the human eye is not a factor (the Michelson crew aimed their beams by eye) and the clocking is done, in effect, by a photoelectric cell...