Sites log: Very-Frank (Frank W. Very, The Luminiferous Ether, 1919)

Run 1, 2026-10-04. Investigator (Step I). Standard run with the 10-minute web cap. Chrome was used for all searching. The clock ran from date +%s 1791148428, and the last check before stopping showed 260 s elapsed by the shell clock. Search stopped after the planned site set, so the shell figure may undercount wall time. Downloads: none were made in this run. Downloading needs the owner's go-ahead, so the PDF URLs are listed in the research notes for the owner to fetch into research/files/ if wanted.

Keywords tried

• "Frank W. Very" astronomer Westwood Astrophysical Observatory
• "Very" "New-Church Review" ether OR aura OR Swedenborg Principia Westwood
• Fessenden "Gyroscopic Quanta" Science 1914
• "Very" "luminiferous ether" 1919 review "Four Seas" OR "Westwood" Swedenborg aura
• "Westwood Astrophysical Observatory" history Westwood Massachusetts Very
• "Frank W. Very" Swedenborg "New Philosophy" OR "Swedenborg Scientific Association" Principia
• IA: title:(new-church review); identifier:new-church-review-1894_1912/1913/1918*
• IA: title:"gyroscopic quanta" OR title:"ether vortices" OR (creator:fessenden AND year:[1899 TO 1915]) OR creator:"very, frank"
• IA: creator:(very) AND (title:nipher OR "cosmic cycle" OR "light of the stars" OR ether OR aether OR electron)
• IA: title:nipher AND year:[1918 TO 1921]
• ADS: author:"Very, F. W." year:1905-1928
• JSTOR: "gyroscopic quanta" fessenden

Keywords not yet tried (for the next run): "Frank Washington Very" aura; "What becomes of the light of the stars" Very; "A Cosmic Cycle" Very 1902 American Journal of Science; "Nova Persei" nebulosity Very 1903; Very "galactic cell"; "ether-particle" Swedenborg; Very Nipher 1920; "Westwood Astrophysical Observatory" Lowell 1906; Portia Mary Vickers Very; Hirn "resisting medium"; Hicks vortex atom; Bjerknes pulsating spheres gravitation; Fessenden "Quantum Radiation"; Fessenden "Electrical Theory of Gravitation" 1901.

Leads for review

1. The inventor's own work

• Very 1909, "The Conservation of Mass and the Passing of Matter", Science 30:491-496 [web] https://archive.org/stream/jstor-1635576/1635576_djvu.txt. This is his first statement of claim 7: atoms are destroyed into radiation and "reproduced" elsewhere, and "the ether is the great storehouse of energy". It also holds early forms of claim 3 (matter as "vacuities in an exceedingly dense ether, kept from collapsing by the centrifugal pressure of a rapidly rotating shell") and claim 4 (light slowed in water by deflections in "the bound ether attached to the molecules"). Very used Kaufmann's mass-velocity experiment and the light-pressure measurements of Lebedew and of Nichols & Hull as evidence. He wrote down an explicit mass equation, dm/m0 = v/(V - v), for the mass that radiation adds to a body.
• Very, "A Scientific Estimate of Swedenborg's 'Principia'", New-Church Review XX (1913) pp. 161-191 and 392-436 (attribution from the AbeBooks listing; the IA contents page shows the title and pages). This is the long earlier statement of the aura/ether framework (claims 1, 3, 6). Issues: https://archive.org/details/new-church-review-1894_1913-04_20_2 and https://archive.org/details/new-church-review-1894_1913-07_20_3. Not yet read.
• New-Church Review XXV (Oct 1918) pp. 528-576, the first printing of the 1919 pamphlet: https://archive.org/details/new-church-review-1894_1918-10_25_4. The seller says the 1919 pamphlet "includes much additional material". Comparing the two would show what Very added.
• A second scan of the 1919 book, https://archive.org/details/luminiferousethe00veryrich. It could give an independent reading of the exponents and the 1.660e22 figure (claim 3; deep read section 3.1).
• Very, "On Nipher's 'Gravitational' Experiment and the Anomalies ...", Science, 30 Jan 1920 (science.org, paywalled). This is Very's post-1919 treatment of an experiment that claimed an electrical effect on gravity (claim 6).
• Earlier Very papers he cites himself: "A Cosmic Cycle", Am. J. Sci. 13:193 (1902); "An Inquiry into the Cause of the Nebulosity around Nova Persei", Am. J. Sci. (July 1903). In the latter he argues that particles left the star near light speed under a non-gravitational, magnetic-like control at stellar distances (bears on claim 6, forces at galactic scale).
• The New-Church Messenger of July 1900 mentions "A lengthy paper by Professor Frank W. Very on ..." (https://swedenborg.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Messenger-07-1900.pdf). Very's Swedenborgian scientific writing goes back at least to 1900.

2. Supporting information by others

• Fessenden, "Gyroscopic Quanta", Science 39:533 (10 Apr 1914) [web] https://archive.org/stream/jstor-1640236/1640236_djvu.txt. Very says his view "agrees in a general way" with this note. Fessenden states that "the amount of work done in upsetting the gyroscope varies directly as the angular velocity", which "is directly proportional to the frequency". This is the link from overturn energy to frequency (E proportional to nu) that the deep read found missing in Very's text (claim 2). Fessenden also says the positive nucleus "can be formed of a number of negative electrons" (claim 5).
• Fessenden, "A Determination of the Nature and Velocity of Gravitation", Science 12:740-745 (16 Nov 1900) [web] https://archive.org/stream/jstor-1628439/1628439_djvu.txt. This is the source Very quotes. It confirms that the "diameter" and the "dynes" wording are Fessenden's own. So the radius/diameter slip the deep read suspected sits in the original, not in Very's copying (claim 3; check the exponents on the page image). Fessenden also derives an ether "volume elasticity" from the surface stress and a gravitational energy of the corpuscle of about 10^-48 erg. This is the evident model for Very's 10^73 "volume-elasticity" step. His experiment on a stretched glass prism compared with the Kerr effect (30e6 against 25e6 dynes; he calls the agreement "probably accidental") is an experimental claim that the density of the medium sets the speed of light (claim 4).
• Fessenden, "Inertia and Gravitation", Science 12:325-328 (31 Aug 1900) [web] https://archive.org/stream/jstor-1629562/1629562_djvu.txt. "Inertia ... due to the electromagnetic inductance of the corpuscular charges", and gravity due to an ether density change caused by electrostatic stress. A proposed test: gases should weigh slightly more than solids (claims 5 and 6).

3. Closely related work

• Fessenden, "Transformation of Gravitational Waves into Ether Vortices", Science 38:553-554 (17 Oct 1913) [web] https://archive.org/stream/jstor-1638835/1638835_djvu.txt. Gravitational waves in a frictionless ether shed identical vortices, so "every continuous medium theory must involve quanta". He also says nucleus resonance gives quanta. This is a vortex-ether route to quantisation parallel to Very's (claims 1, 2, 6).
• Fessenden's single-vortex "etheron" ether (1900) is related to FitzGerald's vortex-sponge ether (named by Fessenden). Other names Very cites, for follow-up: Hicks's vortex atom, Bjerknes's pulsating spheres, Burton and Leahy on pulsation gravity, and Stokes (1845) on aberration.
• Fessenden's account of resistance (priority 2/4 context): his 1890-91 theory that all atoms carry charges was refused publication "for practically a year", then printed with an editorial calling it "probably wrong". He records Ostwald's 1891 objection. This is about the treatment of his ideas, not Very's.

4. Historical record

• Westwood Astrophysical Observatory: Wikipedia names Percival Lowell as patron. A Dollar Bank snippet says Lowell invited Very in 1906 to the "newly built" observatory. Lowell died in 1916, and Very's 1918-19 ether work and its New-Church publication came after that. Who funded Westwood after 1916, and what happened to the observatory and Very's papers after his death in 1927, is unknown so far. Records to target: the Lowell Observatory Archives (Lowell-Very correspondence), the Univ. of Pittsburgh Allegheny Observatory Records (a correspondence file "Very, Frank (Westwood Astrophysical Observatory)"), the Boston Daily Globe obituary of 24 Nov 1927, the Westwood MA historical records, and Ogden's 1928 memoriam (ADS scan, not yet read).
• Reception: no contemporary review of the 1919 pamphlet was found in this run. The sources searched were Google and IA titles. Silence there is not evidence of how the book was received. The AAS abstract of the 20 Aug 1918 meeting (Popular Astronomy 1918) and the reviews in The New Philosophy are the records to check next.
• Very's 1910 public exposure of the Norwood "meteorite" as a fraud (jstor-1636137), after he had first reported the fall (jstor-1634788), is a record of how he handled evidence.