My blog has been a good impetus to research a number of interesting scientific topics more deeply than I would otherwise have had the ambition to do. For instance, since the blog’s inception, I’ve been pushing the origins of “invisibility physics” further and further back in time.
When I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on the subject, I believed the earliest article connected with invisibility was a 1910 article by Paul Ehrenfest on radiationless accelerations of charged particles. However, blog-related research eventually turned up a 1902 paper on a curious and crude invisibility device, and that paper in turn was inspired by a comment made by Lord Rayleigh in an encyclopedia article in 1884.
I’ve had a suspicion for some time, though, that the trail must go back further. The evidence for this, albeit thin, is a weird tale written in 1859 by Irish-born American writer Fitz James O’Brien, titled “What Was It? A Mystery“. In the story, a group of lodgers take up residence in an abandoned house that is widely reputed to be haunted. Their initial amusement turns to horror when one of the group, the narrator Harry, is attacked by a creature that is invisible but very much of flesh and blood. They manage to subdue the monster, alive, and tie it to the bed. What follows is colleague Hammond’s attempt to explain the seemingly supernatural phenomenon:
We remained silent for some time, listening to the low, irregular breathing of the creature on the bed, and watching the rustle of the bedclothes as it impotently struggled to free itself from confinement. Then Hammond spoke.
“Harry, this is awful.”
“Aye, awful.”
“But not unaccountable.”
“Not unaccountable! What do you mean? Such a thing has never occurred since the birth of the world. I know not what to think, Hammond. God grant that I am not mad, and that this is not an insane fantasy!”
“Let us reason a little, Harry. Here is a solid body which we touch, but which we cannot see. The fact is so unusual that it strikes us with terror. Is there no parallel, though, for such a phenomenon? Take a piece of pure glass. It is tangible and transparent. A certain chemical coarseness is all that prevents its being so entirely transparent as to be totally invisible. It is not theoretically impossible, mind you, to make a glass which shall not reflect a single ray of light—a glass so pure and homogeneous in its atoms that the rays from the sun shall pass through it as they do through the air, refracted but not reflected. We do not see the air, and yet we feel it.”
“That’s all very well, Hammond, but these are inanimate substances. Glass does not breathe, air does not breathe. This thing has a heart that palpitates,—a will that moves it,—lungs that play, and inspire and respire.”
Though invisibility has played a large role in mythology through the ages, O’Brien’s story is evidently the very first story that provides a scientific explanation for the phenomenon. Though O’Brien was ahead of his time, by the late 1800s/early 1900s a number of fiction authors would propose their own quasi-scientific theories of invisibility, including H.G. Wells in his famous 1897 novel The Invisible Man.
But what inspired these stories? Clearly O’Brien and, as we will see, H.G. Wells had some specific science in mind when they concocted their tales of invisibility, but what science, and from whom? In this post, I would like to engage in some speculation and propose that they were inspired, directly or indirectly, by Isaac Newton!
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Skulls in the Stars 