"More than a hundred years have elapsed since Benjamin Franklin, employing a phraseology now superseded, put forth a theory of matter. It was pronounced "a delusion" by the physicists of the nineteenth century, but the scientists of the twentieth century, according to Sir Oliver Lodge, may be forced to rehabilitate it as the only means of issue from the labyrinth in which all physical study is now involved. ...the Franklin theory is that electricity and matter in combination form a neutral substance, which is the atom of matter as we know it. The most interesting part of the problem for ourselves, says Sir Oliver, is the explanation of matter in terms of electricity, the view that electricity is, as Franklin seems to have supposed, the fundamental "substance." What we men of to-day have been accustomed to regard as an indivisible atom of matter is thus built up out of electricity. All atoms—atoms of all sorts of "substances"—are built up of the same thing. In our day... the theoretical and proximate achievement of what philosophers from Franklin's day to ours have always sought—a unification of matter—is offering itself to physical inquiry."