The first things discovered by the telescope were the larger satellites of Jupiter. With that precision for which astronomers are noted, they soon drew up time-tables, showing not only the past movements of these bodies, but also their future ones. They were soon puzzled, however, by the obvious fact that the moons of Jupiter were not working according to schedule, to use a railway expression. They got later and later for a time, and then gradually quickened up until they got too fast. Then they slowed down again. This repeated itself, and is going on still, with this difference, however, that the cause has been discovered and the schedules amended accordingly. The solution of the puzzle was that when the earth and the great planet are on the same side of the sun they are some 186 millions of miles nearer together than when they are on opposite sides of the sun. The evolutions of the satellites are quite regular, according to the astronomers' calculations, but they seemed to the earthly astronomers to vary, because of the time which light took to traverse that 186 millions of miles. When the two bodies were nearest together the occurrences seemed to happen about 1000 seconds (16 minutes) earlier than when they were farthest apart. Consequently it became evident that light took 1000 seconds to travel 186 million miles, or that, in other words, it moved at the prodigious speed of 186 thousand miles per second. That discovery was, of course, many years ago, but experiments since have proved the figure mentioned to be about right.
It put beyond question the fact that the action of a distant light upon the eye was not an "action at a distance," for such action, were it possible, would take effect at once. Seeing that light passed from the distant satellites at a definite velocity, and took a certain time to reach us, it was evident that it was, during that time, passing through a medium of some sort, and that medium must be the ether, for no alternative explanation will suffice.
So it became recognised that light really consists of waves or undulations of some sort in the ether; that a distant, luminous body set these waves going; that they travelled with a definite velocity, and then, striking our eyes, produced the sensation known as light. Many things were found out about light in the years which followed the discovery of its velocity. The lengths of the waves were ascertained--that is to say, the distance from the crest of one to the crest of the next. The different lengths were sorted out and found to give rise to different colours, while longer waves, which produced no sensation of light, were found to carry heat, thereby explaining how the heat reaches us from a distant fire, or from the sun.