Note 1 — Chapter XVIII · A PIONEER IN AN UNKNOWN REALM.

The existence of atoms, if proved, as claimed by the pioneer of whom we write, confirms Priestly’s idea that all discoveries are made by chance; for it certainly was by a mere chance, as we view things with our limited knowledge, that Keely stumbled over the dissociation of the supposed simple elements of water by vibratory force;1 thus making good Roscoe’s assumption that, by the application of more powerful means than were known to him, still more simple bodies would be shown up. Had Keely subdivided these corpuscles of matter, after a method known to physicists, he would have been hailed as a discoverer, when it was announced by Arthur Goddard, in the British Mercantile Gazette, in 1887, that Keely declared electricity to be a certain form of atomic vibration of what is called the luminiferous ether.