"Lorentz accepted what appeared to him to be inevitable, and asserted that the time had come to recognize that nature seemed to have entered into some giant conspiracy to defraud us of a knowledge of our velocity through the ether. Accordingly, he laid down his celebrated principle of correlation, according to which adjustments were so regulated in nature that the velocity of our planet through the ether could never be detected, however precise our measurements. Lorentz applied his mathematical talents to the discovery of the necessary adjustments which would have to exist in nature for this correlation to be satisfied completely so far as electrodynamics and optics were concerned. ...He succeeded in establishing the transformations which would be in harmony with the invariance of the electrodynamic equations, and he found these to differ perceptibly with the classical ones; although reducing to the latter in the case of low velocities. The new transformations constitute the celebrated Lorentz transformations. ... These transformations expressed the existence of two separate phenomena: first, the Fitzgerald contraction of bodies moving through the ether... and secondly, a new phenomenon consisting in the slowing down (with increase in velocity through the ether) of the rate of time-flow as applying to electromagnetic processes. ...For psychological reasons, however, imbued with the spirit of classical science, Lorentz was unable to realise the importance of his discovery; and he never succeeded in ridding himself of his belief in the absoluteness of time. For him, and also for Larmor, who contributed to these discoveries, this new species of variable duration, depending as it did on the motion through the ether of the Galilean frame, was not real time. It was a species of "local time"—a distortion of real time—the time which the observer in the moving frame would live and sense. And so Lorentz assumed that these new transformations applied only to purely electromagnetic quantities, and no reference was made to their being applicable to mechanical phenomena as well. Though, as a result of these transformations, the velocity of light proved to have always the same invariant value through all Galilean frames when measured by the observer in the frame, no suspicion was cast on the classical formula for the composition of the velocities of material bodies; and this in spite of the fact that the two circumstances were mutually incompatible."