"If the ether is stationary, as postulated by Fresnel, the optically important phenomenon of aberration is completely explained, but the Michelson Morley experiment appeared to show that this hypothesis was untenable, and left aberration without the shadow of an explanation. ...Fitzgerald... and Lorentz... nearly at the same time made the same suggestion as a possible way out of the difficulty. ...Fitzgerald and Lorentz suggested that the dimensions of the block of sandstone [on which the interferometer mirrors were mounted] were altered by its drift through the ether, that... the stone was shorter... in the direction of the earth's motion in space than when it lay at right angles to this motion. ...All substances might experience such a deformation... but it was conceivable that they might not be all deformed alike, that a soft and yielding substance like wood might suffer a different amount of shortening from that of stone or iron. In 1904 Morley and Miller repeated the experiment of 1887, using a lvery much larger apparatus, the path of each of the interfering beams of light being now 32 metres instead of about 11... The mirrors were separated by rods of pine instead of sandstone... But the effects were the same. No effect could be discovered... to show that the earth drifts or moves through the ether. ...The mathematicians now took the matter up, and under the leadership of Einstein and Minkowski put forward the principle of relativity in all measurements of space and time..."