It’s always kind of wonderful to read older texts. For one, the style is often much more approachably clear; for another, sometimes you find hidden gems of history.<p>One of my favorite bits of science history is the first edition of a text on metallurgy, that was meant for sales reps for a carnegie steel affiliate company.<p>The purpose of the book was to give sales reps enough clue to not embarrass themselves; it’s evolved and the book, now in its 8th edition or something, is a standard reference text for undergraduates.<p>Anyway the first chapter or so of the 1914 text was explaining the basic chemistry of the universe and went something like:<p><i>The three things that make up our physical universe are: matter, which is stuff that has mass; energy, which is the capacity to do work; and the luminiferous aether, which is the medium through which light propagates...</i>