HathiTrust Digital Library, 2026-10-08

Investigator (STEP I), project Thompson-JJ. Found through Google (J. J. Thomson "The Structure of Light" 1925 Fison lecture Faraday tubes ether full text). Catalog record https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001989291 ; two full-view copies: mdp.39015064384293 and uc1.b4253120 (rights: Public Domain, Google-digitized). Script access (curl) gets a Cloudflare check; Chrome works. Text read page by page in Chrome (plain-text view); not saved (the viewer asks users not to save or redistribute), so passages are quoted here.

J. J. Thomson, The Structure of Light: the Fison Memorial Lecture, 1925 (Cambridge University Press, xii + 38 pp.) (own work, priority 1)

https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015064384293 - Lines of force as physical things: "I suppose that these lines are not merely geometrical figments, but that they, or rather the groups of them forming tubes of force that end on an electron, are physical realities, and that the energy in the electric field is bound up with these tubes." [web, p.20] - Two classes of tubes: those with ends (anchored to an electron and a positive charge, so they "drag these masses along with them", their speed having "no relation with the velocity of light"), and closed tubes, which "move with the velocity of light"; an electrical wave is "a system of closed lines of force moving everywhere at right angles to the direction of the line". [web, pp.20-21] - Light from an atom has two parts. The corpuscular part, "which corresponds to the quantum", is "an anchor ring formed of closed lines of electric force; this ring moves forward at right angles to its plane with the velocity of light, and this movement does not change its size or shape." The ring can vibrate, "the time of vibration being the time light takes to travel round the circumference of the ring; thus the frequency of its vibration is inversely proportional to its circumference." While being ejected it starts "a system of ordinary Maxwellian waves". [web, pp.21-22] - The lecture also reviews Newton's "fits" and corpuscle-plus-ether view of light. [web, early pages]

How it bears on the claims

• Claim 2 (mass and energy as "bound ether" carried by Faraday tubes): Thomson still held the tube picture in 1925 and extended it to light.
• Claim 3 (X-rays as pulses along tubes): the 1925 model is the later form of his pulse theory, now a closed ring carrying a quantum.
• Claim 6 (vortex rings, 1883): the quantum as a closed "anchor ring" (a torus) moving normal to its plane, with a vibration period set by its circumference, is a field-line analogue of the vortex ring of his Adams Prize essay. This connection is an Investigator observation, not Thomson's words.
• Companion papers (from Crossref, not read): "A suggestion as to the structure of light", Phil. Mag. 48, 737-746 (Oct 1924), doi 10.1080/14786442408634536; "The structure of light", Phil. Mag. 50, 1181-1196 (Dec 1925), doi 10.1080/14786442508634844.