The concept of "the ether" is as old as Aristotle. It came into its own, however, when espoused by Sir Isaac Newton as a requirement for light to propagate by means of waves.
It was believed to be a universal, all-pervasive, static medium, through which all celestial bodies moved, and which permeated all creation. The concept survived into the present century, being much talked about when broadcasting began, but no one could ever actually find this ether - except Wilhelm Reich.
Reich was a strange mixture of genius and nut. He was born in 1897, qualified in medicine in Vienna, and during the 1920s studied psychoanalysis under Sigmund Freud. He became, in due course, one of the most prominent, if controversial, practitioners of his day and many of the psychoanalytical theories he proposed are widely respected even now. Many others, however, had a moral dimension that many of his more staid contemporaries found hard to take.
For these, and other reasons connected with his left-wing politics, Reich did not endear himself to locals anywhere he went. He moved first to Berlin and then, when the political climate grew unpleasant there in 1933, to Copenhagen. Public outrage at his theories and his methodologies forced him to move to Sweden, then to Oslo and finally, in 1939, to the United States.
It was there that Reich developed his interest in the ether but he extended the original concept quite considerably. He was able to measure its motion over the surface of the Earth and declared that it moved from west to east in a stream that was sometimes interrupted by the weather.
The ether was blue in colour and was responsible for the bluish tinge on distant hills and for the colour of the sea. Moreover, associated with the ether was a ubiquitous form of energy that he called "orgone"; it permeated all nature, was responsible for lightning and the glow-worm's luminous tail, and was the stimulus for all human sexual activity. Indeed the human orgasm, being a sudden discharge of this orgone energy, was therefore closely related to a flash of lightning.
Reich's end was dismal. He began to manufacture and sell, probably in good faith, an apparatus to trap this orgone energy so that its therapeutic effects would be available to private users.
The authorities declared it was a fraud and he ended up in prison where he died in November 1957. As one biographer has put it: "Such was the sad but, one can't help feeling quite appropriate, end to a career so utterly serious and hopelessly grandiose that it faded almost imperceptibly into farce."