Central claims: Lodge-O (Oliver Lodge, "The Ether of Space", 1908)

Only one document is in the folder: "The Ether of Space.pdf", a 14-page JSTOR scan of Lodge's article in The North American Review, vol. 187 no. 630 (May 1908), pp. 724-736, from his Royal Institution discourse of 21 Feb 1908. It was fully read as text; pp.2-9 and pp.10-14 were deep-read, with page images for pp.5 and 10-12. No source gap for this article. The derivation of the headline ether density is cited to Lodge's Philosophical Magazine paper of April 1907 (sect. 12) and appears in the 1909 book (App. 2); both were downloaded by the Investigator and read by the Step 2 reviewers. The derivation reduces to electromagnetic mass plus an assumed electron radius.

1. Action at a distance does not occur: matter acts on matter only through a continuous ether, which carries all strain, cohesion and potential energy and is itself absolutely stationary (no locomotion).
2. Matter is made of the ether: an electron is a singularity in an ether of perfectly uniform density (not a rarefaction), and all mass, momentum and kinetic energy are those of ether carried along by Faraday tubes (quoting J. J. Thomson).
3. The ether density is of the order of 10^12 g/cm^3 (electron mass divided by effective electron volume), giving elasticity of order 10^33 c.g.s., an internal whirl speed of the order of the speed of light (the elasticity and whirl speed are restatements of c given the density, per the arbiter), and about a thousand tons of mass-equivalent and a million-horsepower station's output for forty million years of energy per cubic millimetre. Lodge says inertia could be explained electromagnetically on this density, but does not show it in this article.
4. The ether spins near a charge and a magnetic pole with moment of momentum e*m (J. J. Thomson), Faraday's magnetic rotation is the gyrostatic evidence for it, and Current, Magnetism and Motion form three mutually perpendicular vectors (E, H, V) that link electricity, magnetism and mechanics and may underlie the three dimensions of space.
5. A moving fluid can imitate solid rigidity and elasticity (Kelvin's kinetic elasticity), so a perfect-fluid ether can make solid matter; Lodge's own spinning-steel-disc test (1 yard across, 4,000 rpm) found no effect on light, which he takes to show the ether cannot be spun mechanically. Primary sources (Phil. Trans. 1893, 1897) document runs chiefly at 3,000 rpm (4,000 is the 1908 lecture figure); Lodge's own conclusion was 'no viscous connexion', with irrotational ether motion undetectable by optical experiments.
6. Matter in aggregate is extremely rare compared with the ether (visible cosmos about 1e-23 of the density of water, from Kelvin's 1.5e36 tons in 1.12e59 m^3, i.e. Kelvin's 1,000-parsec sphere), so ether being immensely denser than matter is consistent; Lodge also suggests, tentatively, that the ether has psychical significance.

Notes for later steps: the digest gave the telescope parallax as 1/2 arc-second, but the page image shows 1/1000 second; use the deep read. The digest also gave the p.5 disruption stress as 10^88 dynes/cm^2; the page image shows 10^33. Digest page labels from p.11 on run one page late. The deep read finds Lodge's horsepower-years energy figure to be about 10 times rho*c^2 per mm^3 (about 9e22 J), with no calculation shown in the article [computation].

Secondary items from the pp.2-9 deep read (not central claims): Lodge's alternative to ether-pressure gravitation (Newton's 1/distance pressure deficit) and his escape clause that the main mass might be the positive charge (p.14) would still give a similar density order; 'sudden change of speed, not speed, generates ether waves' (p.9); Moon-rod and Maxwell-stress figures on pp.4-5 (rod figure checks; Maxwell's 3,000x/2,500x do not reproduce from g^2/8piG, source unread). Related work found in the Investigator's files: Silberstein/Lodge 1920 (Phil. Mag. v.39), where an ether index n = 1 + 2GM/(rc^2) reproduces the first-order Einstein deflection.