Edward Williams Morley | Biography

Morley was the eldest of four children born to a Congregationalist minister in Newark, New Jersey in 1838. He entered Williams College at age nineteen, and upon his graduation in 1860 he promptly enrolled at Andover Theological Seminary. While continuing his theological studies, he earned his master's degree at Williams in 1863 and completed his training at the seminary the following year.

Chemistry had been Morley's hobby throughout his schooling as a distraction from his intense studies. While waiting for a post in the ministry, however, he spent a good deal of time conducting lab experiments and he developed a keen interest in emerging theories concerning the structure of matter. When a position in the chemistry department at Western Reserve University opened, he accepted it with the stipulation that he be allowed to preach at the university chapel. As a professor at Western Reserve, Morley developed an obsession for precision and accuracy in measurements. Early in his career, he spent much of his time repeating other scientists' experiments, testing them for correctness and accuracy. He conducted exhaustive research on oxygen, determining first, as precisely as possible, the percent of oxygen contained in our atmosphere, and later, through a variety of methods, the atomic weight of an oxygen molecule.

Morley equipped his laboratory with the most sophisticated measuring devices of the time. If some necessary apparatus was not available, he constructed it himself. After just a few years he had surrounded himself with perhaps the most complete array of precise scientific equipment in North America, and it was this collection--along with his natural passion for accurate measurement--that attracted Case School of Applied Science professor Albert Abraham Michelson.

Michelson had been attempting to prove the existence of an ether -- an invisible substance that was believed to comprise the empty spaces in the universe. Michelson believed--as did many other prominent scientists--that light was an undulating wave, and that ether was the medium through which it traveled. Michelson invented a device called an interferometer that would be able to detect the ether-wind as it affected the velocities of two beams of light. He recruited Morley (and his supply of laboratory equipment) to help him conduct his groundbreaking research. The now legendary Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 took five days to complete, and the results were undeniable: after nearly fifty hours of research and observation, absolutely no evidence could be found to support the ether-drift theory. Disgusted with this outcome, the two scientists pronounced the experiment a failure. The scientific community, however, saw their findings as proof that ether did not exist, and the tide of theory and research began to turn toward new hypotheses, eventually culminating in 1905 with Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity.