"About thirty-three years ago Maxwell, following up a suggestive experiment made by Faraday in 1845, evolved an ideally simple theory which intimately connected light, radiant heat, and electrical phenomena, interpreting them as being all due to vibrations of a hypothetical fluid of inconceivable tenuity, called the ether. No experimental verification was arrived at until Hertz, at the suggestion of Helmholtz, undertook a series of experiments to this effect. Hertz proceeded with extraordinary ingenuity and insight, but devoted little energy to the perfection of his old-fashioned apparatus. The consequence was that he failed to observe the important function which the air played in his experiments, and which I subsequently discovered. Repeating his experiments and reaching different results, I ventured to point out this oversight. The strength of the proofs brought forward by Hertz in support of Maxwell’s theory resided in the correct estimate of the rates of vibration of the circuits he used. But I ascertained that he could not have obtained the rates he thought he was getting. The vibrations with identical apparatus he employed are, as a rule, much slower, this being due to the presence of air, which produces a dampening effect upon a rapidly vibrating electric circuit of high pressure, as a fluid does upon a vibrating tuning-fork. I have, however, discovered since that time other causes of error, and I have long ago ceased to look upon his results as being an experimental verification of the poetical conceptions of Maxwell. The work of the great German physicist has acted as an immense stimulus to contemporary electrical research, but it has likewise, in a measure, by its fascination, paralyzed the scientific mind, and thus hampered independent inquiry. Every new phenomenon which was discovered was made to fit the theory, and so very often the truth has been unconsciously distorted."
–Nikola Tesla