Next consider inertia.  How would one illustrate the fact that water, for instance, possesses inertia—­the power of persisting in motion against obstacles—­the power of possessing kinetic energy?  The most direct way would be to take a stream of water and try suddenly to stop it.  Open a water tap freely and then suddenly shut it.  The impetus or momentum of the stopped water makes itself manifest by a violent shock to the pipe, with which everybody must be familiar.  The momentum of water is utilized by engineers in the “water ram.”

A precisely analogous experiment in electricity is what Faraday called “the extra current.”  Send a current through a coil of wire round a piece of iron, or take any other arrangement for developing powerful magnetism, and then suddenly stop the current by breaking the circuit.  A violent flash occurs if the stoppage is sudden enough, a flash which means the bursting of the insulating air partition by the accumulated electro-magnetic momentum.

Briefly, we may say that nearly all electro-magnetic experiments illustrate the fact of ethereal inertia.

Now return to consider what happens when a charged conductor (say a Leyden jar) is discharged.  The recoil of the strained dielectric causes a current, the inertia of this current causes it to overshoot the mark, and for an instant the charge of the jar is reversed; the current now flows backward and charges the jar up as at first; back again flows the current, and so on, charging and reversing the charge with rapid oscillations until the energy is all dissipated into heat.  The operation is precisely analogous to the release of a strained spring or to the plucking of a stretched string.

But the discharging body thus thrown into strong electrical vibration is embedded in the all-pervading ether, and we have just seen that the ether possesses the two properties requisite for the generation and transmission of waves—­viz., elasticity and inertia or density; hence, just as a tuning fork vibrating in air excites aerial waves or sound, so a discharging Leyden jar in ether excites ethereal waves or light.

Ethereal waves can therefore be actually produced by direct electrical means.  I discharge here a jar, and the room is for an instant filled with light.  With light, I say, though you can see nothing.  You can see and hear the spark indeed—­but that is a mere secondary disturbance we can for the present ignore—­I do not mean any secondary disturbance.  I mean the true ethereal waves emitted by the electric oscillation going on in the neighborhood of this recoiling dielectric.  You pull aside the prong of a tuning fork and let it go; vibration follows and sound is produced.  You charge a Leyden jar and let it discharge; vibration follows and light is excited.