Maxwell assumed, that “his” waves propagate in a medium filling all space,
including between material bodies, something like Cartesius' space
He called this medium “cosmic ether”.
The Doppler type correction to the speed of the light coming from “ether
wind”, as calculated by Maxwell himself, should be
proportional to the wind velocity - it means for the orbital motion of the
Earth it should be in the
10-8
range.
In 1881 Albert Michaelson made the first experiment in Postdam, however with
an unsufficient precision. He repeated it in 1887 with Edward Morley in Cleveland.
The spectrometer was rotated by 90°, rays of light travel the distance between
mirrors many times, and beton postument was floating on a mercury pond.
The result was negative: there was
no ether wind!
Albert
Abraham Michelson, son of the Samuel Michaelson and Rozalia (from home Przylubska)
was born in 1851 in Strzelno, at thas time under Prussian goverment. He emigrated
with parents to the United States in age of two. A story says that cowboys
from Nevada collected money to pay the Michelsons' school. In 1873 he become
the US Navy officer, leaving it in 1883, when he become a proffesor in Applied
Science School in Cleveland. He turned back to the Navy during the first
World War.