The Western Reserve, Edward Morley, and Oxygen

Edward Morley was an early member of the faculty of Western Reserve University in Cleveland. He was a very talented experimentalist who collaborated with Michelson of the Case School of Applied Science on the famous “Speed Of Light through the Ether” measurements in the 1880’s. In the 1890’s, Morley accomplished the difficult feat of providing the atomic weight of Oxygen, demonstrating by three separate quantitative methods and to the third decimal, that the atomic weight of oxygenwas 15.879, significantly less than the 16 predicted by the then current “Prout Hypothesis.”