ABSTRACT
When the sphere moves it sets the water around it in motion. The necessity of doing this makes the sphere behave as if its mass were increased by a mass equal to half the mass of a sphere of water of the same volume as the sphere itself. This additional mass is not in the sphere but in the space around it. . . If we adopt the electrical theory of the constitution of matter we may suppose that all mass is electrical in its origin, and therefore not in the atoms or molecules themselves but in the space around their charges. The hydrodynamical analogue of this would be the case of the motion through water of exceedingly thin spherical shells, so thin that their mass was infinitesimal in comparison with that of the water they displaced. A collection of these would have a finite mass equal to half that of the water they displaced. [I]
Now suppose that the whole of the mass of a corpuscle was due to its motion. Then there was the possibility of explaining ail matter as electric charges (specifically corpuscles) in motion. The potential for unification was enormous and was seized on by many physicists, particularly in Britain and Germany.
