Of the actual nature of the waves, however, little was known, although there was a vague idea that they were connected in some way with electricity, at which point in the story there comes in the famous name of James Clerk Maxwell, a professor of Cambridge University, who in 1864 produced before the Royal Society the explanation of the nature of the waves and their connection with electricity and magnetism. That in itself was a wonderful achievement, but far more wonderful still is the fact that he truly predicted the existence of longer waves than any then known, which no one knew how to cause, or how to detect if caused. That prediction has since been fulfilled. The long waves have been found; we know how to make them and how to perceive their presence. They are the messengers which carry our wireless messages. The discovery of these, at that time unknown waves, on paper, by simply calculating and reasoning about them, is more marvellous even than the feat of Adams and Le Verrier in discovering a planet on paper before anyone had seen it. It established Maxwell among the heroes of science for all time. A magnet acts upon a piece of iron some distance away. The pull must be transmitted through some kind of ether. A current of electricity behaves in the same way, acting precisely as a magnet, with power to affect things at a distance. Again an ether is necessary. A dynamo works by moving a magnet past a wire which it does not touch, thereby generating current in it. There again an ether is necessary to transmit the effect from the one to the other. Taking, then, the known magnetic effects of an electric current and the electrifying effects of magnets, he was able to show that the same ether accounted for all, and for the transmission of light as well, that, in fact, there was but one ether which performed all these various duties. He proved from the known facts about electricity and magnetism that waves such as he imagined would, in fact, move with the speed of light. And once knowing the nature of the waves, he asserted that in all probability there were others of which men had then no practical knowledge. Maxwell's theory soon set experimenters searching for the means of producing the long waves which he had predicted would be found. Several authorities had before then stated their belief that the current derived from a Leyden jar was not simply a flow in one direction. They suggested, and gave grounds for the belief, that the current surged to and fro for some time before it settled down; that it swung to and fro, indeed, like a pendulum.