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In 1845 Foucault and Fizeau took a daguerreotype photograph of the sun. In 1850 Bond produced one of the moon of great beauty, Draper having made some attempts at an even earlier date.
This theory also called the theory of the stationary luminiferous ether moreover found a strong support in an experiment which is also of fundamental importance in the special theory of relativity, the experiment of Fizeau, from which one was obliged to infer that the luminiferous ether does not take part in the movements of bodies.
This aspect of Doppler's principle was adverted to by Fizeau in 1848, and the first tangible results in the estimation of movements of approach and recession between the earth and the stars, were communicated by Sir William Huggins to the Royal Society, April 23, 1868.
Half a century after Fresnel's death, when the ether hypothesis had become an accepted tenet of science, experiments were undertaken by Fizeau in France, and by Clerk-Maxwell in England, to ascertain whether any portion of ether is really thus bound to particles of matter; but the results of the experiments were negative, and the question is still undetermined.
I refer to the speed of light, which appears to us, as we shall see further on, the maximum value of speed which can be given to a material body. After the historical experiments of Fizeau and Foucault, taken up afresh, as we know, partly by Cornu, and partly by Michelson and Newcomb, it remained still possible to increase the precision of the measurements.
At one table sat Mary Somerville, Leverrier, Adams, La Place, Gauss and Helmholz; at another Dalton, Schonbeim, Davy, Tyndall, Berthollet, Berzelius, Priestly, Lavoisier, and Liebig; here were groups of physicists Faraday, Volta, Galvani, Ampere, Fahrenheit, Henry, Draper, Biot, Chladini, Black, Melloni, Senarmont, Regnault, Daniells, Fresnel, Fizeau, Mariotte, Deville, Troost, Gay-Lussac, Foucault, Wheatstone, and many, many more.
Wiss., Bd. ii., 1841-42, p. 467. See also Fizeau in the Ann. de Chem. et de Phys., 1870, p. 211. R. S. Phil. Trans., 1868. Ast. Nach., No. 1, 864. We have seen how the theory of the solar system was slowly developed by the constant efforts of the human mind to find out what are the rules of cause and effect by which our conception of the present universe and its development seems to be bound.
In the history of the applications of electrical undulations, the names of Young, Fresnel, Fizeau, and Foucault must be inscribed; without these scholars, the assimilation between electrical and luminous phenomena which they discovered and studied would evidently have been impossible.
Professor Michelson has undertaken some new researches by a method which is a combination of the principle of the toothed wheel of Fizeau with the revolving mirror of Foucault.
Subsequently Fizeau, and quite recently Cornu, employing not planetary or stellar distances, but simply the breadth of the city of Paris, determined the velocity of light: while Foucault a man of the rarest mechanical genius solved the problem without quitting his private room.
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