Featured on PDR in the collection The Kumatologist: Vaughan Cornish’s Wave Studies (1910–14)

Walking along the Devon coast at low tide in the autumn of 1895, geographer Vaughan Cornish (1862–1948) watched two sets of waves interact on the shore. As one set rippled across the flat strand, the other rounded a shoal and broke onto the beach. After colliding, each set then continued on its separate path, which brought to his mind how waves of light can pass through each other unaffected. Cornish’s casual association, between the behavior of light and water, speaks to how immersed he and his contemporaries were in a world of invisible waves. British and continental science in the 1890s was wrangling with gravitational waves, magnetic waves, sound waves, and mysterious new emanations — cathode rays, x-rays, and uranium radiation. And yet, the common…