This gadget shown in a book by Silvanus Thompson grabbed my attention. It was an attempt to polarize electromagnetic waves using mirrors. There isn’t much info on it, and it doesn’t appear to have proved anything. It sounds like a dead end, but with more persistence it could have led to a momentous discovery.
Augusto Righi’s rig started with the highly productive metaphor of the luminiferous ether.
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Until 1920 most discussion of electricity and radio was based on the assumption of an ether. Michelson-Morley DIDN’T wipe out the ether. It was wiped much later when quantum quackery took over the doctrines and creeds of “science”.
Here’s a nice clear example from a 1904 book by Frederick Vreeland, the inventor of the weirdly wonderful Vreeland Oscillator which worked in a jelly-like way.
This discrepancy will disappear if we assume, in place of water a semi-solid or jelly-like substance, sufficiently mobile to flow under the influence of gravity, yet with an elasticity which resists any displacement with a continuously increasing force. If now we raise the level at A, the whole surface will slope downward from this point, as shown in Fig. 62, and the pressure due to this raising of the level will diminish rapidly as we proceed from A toward B.
Nature uses jelly to interface with jelly, as seen in the electrostatic radio receivers of mud-dwelling fish.
Each pore is filled with insulating jelly. The jelly makes contact with several hair cells, similar to the hair cells in our cochlea. As the varying charge field passes the face, the jelly expands and contracts in a form of electrostriction, similar to a crystal earphone. (In an insulator, charges don’t move around much. So an incoming positive field charges all the atoms of the insulator positively, which makes them repel each other. The insulator thus expands slightly. An incoming negative field does the same. When the field is zero, the insulator is relatively contracted, not repelling itself.)
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This new research on cochlear cells shows another aspect of God’s design and raises an interesting question.
The cochlea includes two rows of sound-sensing hair cells with opposite purposes.
The inner cells (blue) are pure sensors, input to the brain. The outer cells (yellow) are mixed sensor and muscle, mainly bringing a control signal from the brain and actively wiggling in the jelly to alter the fluid vibrations that are sensed by the inner cells. This action is not fully understood yet, but it seems to focus attention on the most important parts of the signal. The OHCs try to cancel out frequencies that are steady or uninteresting, leaving the frequencies that carry meaning.
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Righi took the jelly-like ether seriously. He enclosed a spark-gap in gelatinous vaseline to control its randomness, and then bounced the waves back and forth between rotatable parabolic mirrors. If he had continued mixing organic chemistry with sparks and mirrors, he might have come up with a dye laser in the 1880s.
Here’s a closeup of the spark capsule. Below the bouncing area is a little coherer with a scope to observe it closely.
And here Polistra is using the full Marconi setup to send a message with the gelatinous sparks.
Polistra's Mill 