One of my favorite bits of science history is the first edition of a text on metallurgy, that was meant for sales reps for a carnegie steel affiliate company.
The purpose of the book was to give sales reps enough clue to not embarrass themselves; it’s evolved and the book, now in its 8th edition or something, is a standard reference text for undergraduates.
Anyway the first chapter or so of the 1914 text was explaining the basic chemistry of the universe and went something like:
The three things that make up our physical universe are: matter, which is stuff that has mass; energy, which is the capacity to do work; and the luminiferous aether, which is the medium through which light propagates...
