LARMOR, JOSEPH. - THE FITZGERALD-LORENTZ CONTRACTION CONFIRMED.

A Dynamical Theory of the Electric and Luminiferous Medium. - Part III. Relations with Material Medica. Received April 21, 1897, - Read May 13, 1897.

(London, Harrison and Sons, 1898). 4to. No wrappers as extracted from "Philosophical Transactions" Year 1897, Volume 190 - Series A. - Pp. 205-300, textillustr. Clean and fine.

First appearance of an importent paper announcing the first formulation of the complete Lorentz-transformation and with the first prediction of time dilation. "It seems churlish however to deny that Larmor had gained an importent, if limited insight into time dilation, two years before Lorentz's striking similar and independent insight of 1899."(Harvey R. brown in "Physical relativity", p. 61). - The paper also presents the "Larmor formula".
It's notable that Larmor was the first who recognized that some sort of time dilation is a consequence of the Loretz transformation as well, because individual electrons describe corresponding parts of their orbits in times shorter for the [rest] system in the ratio 1/y.

Parallel to the development of Lorentz ether theory, Larmor published the complete Lorentz transformations in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1897 (in the paper offered) some two years before Hendrik Lorentz (1899, 1904) and eight years before Albert Einstein (1905). Larmor predicted the phenomenon of time dilation, at least for orbiting electrons, and verified that the FitzGerald-Lorentz contraction (length contraction) should occur for bodies whose atoms were held together by electromagnetic forces. In his book Aether and Matter (1900), he again presented the Lorentz transformations, time dilation and length contraction (treating these as dynamic rather than kinematic effects). Larmor opposed Albert Einstein's theory of relativity (though he supported it for a short time). Larmor rejected both the curvature of space and the special theory of relativity, to the extent that he claimed that an absolute time was essential to astronomy.

Larmor held that matter consisted of particles moving in the aether. Larmor believed the source of electric charge was a "particle" (which as early as 1894 he was referring to as the electron). Thus, in what was apparently the first specific prediction of time dilation, he wrote "... individual electrons describe corresponding parts of their orbits in times shorter for the [rest] system in the ratio (1 - v2/c2)1/2" (in the paper offered).

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