Controversy
Thomas Edison announced the discovery, which he termed "etheric force", to the press and reports began to appear in Newark newspapers from November 29, 1875. While etheric force initially met with an enthusiastic reception, sceptics began to question whether it truly was a new phenomenon or merely a consequence of some already known phenomenon such as electromagnetic induction. Leaders among the doubters were James Ashley, editor of the Telegrapher, the inventor Elihu Thomson and Edwin Houston, a high school teacher with whom Thomson had studied. Thomson and Houston conducted a series of careful experiments where they discovered that the sparks actually carried a charge, and they announced their results, not in the popular press as Edison had done, but in a scientific journal, the Journal of the Franklin Institute. This prompted a reply from Edison, more experiments and more scientific papers.
The scepticism is not easily explained on scientific grounds as James Clerk Maxwell had predicted such waves in 1864 (confirmed by Heinrich Hertz in 1889). The negative reception is perhaps better understood as a result of Edison's uneasy relationship with the professional scientific community (see (Hounshell 1980)).
Eventually the controversy increased to the point where Edison was pressured by his principal financial backers Western Union to desist from etheric force research and publicity over it, and to devote himself to what Western Union saw as more commercially viable projects. Edison abandoned work despite having been able to send signals twenty to thirty feet. He also drafted, but did not file, a patent application for an "etheric telegraph" before he abandoned etheric force.
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