ABSTRACT
There are a few key episodes from Albert Michelson's early career that are often described, including especially the story of his months in Berlin and Potsdam in 1881, trying to get an ether-drift experiment to work while on leave from the US Navy, followed by his successful collaboration with Edward Morley in Cleveland in 1887, again failing to detect an ether wind with a more precise version of the same experiment. Through the 1880s and 1890s Michelson was a scientist on the move, building a career around the performance of a few brilliantly designed experiments, and the further development of the instrument that lay at the heart of his ether-drift apparatus. It has often been noted that both Michelson and the Nobel Prize committee that honoured him in 1907 placed more emphasis on the interferometer and its applications than on the ether-drift experiment, a fact that has seemed puzzling in the light of the experiment's importance in the development of electrodynamics and special relativity. This chapter will explore Michelson's engagement with instruments in order to deliver new insight into his experimental work. Our histories of this traveller have focused too narrowly on single experiments to discern the many links tying both the origins of his etherdrift apparatus, and the uses he later gave it, to instruments and concerns that stem from his earliest research on the velocity of light. They have also been too celebratory to recognise some of the deep challenges that underlay Michelson's search to give a distinctive stamp to his research and reputation. In the second part of the chapter I focus on Michelson's research on standards of length, outlining the productive relations between his scientific work and precision industry in the US and showing how fully Michelson, like Rowland, exemplifies the role of an ‘academic mechanician', that Evans and Warner have identified as a typically American phenomenon, bridging science and engineering. This is also the research that most fully explains why Michelson received the Nobel Prize when he did, a question unanswered in earlier historical accounts. 1
