¹ Page numbering is from Annales de Chimie et de Physique, 13 (1908). In the text, Annales page numbers are linked to gallica bibliotheque numerique scanned copies of the original pages in French.
² Page numbering from Gesammelte Werke - Walther Ritz- Oeuvres, Gauthier Villars, Paris, 1911, is shown in parentheses in the body of the text. I thank Mrs. Constance Fox (via Jeffrey Riso of Slidell, Louisiana) for the use of John Fox's annotated copy of this volume.

This work was originally translated from the French to English in 1972-1973 by Ms. Joclyn Lucier, a French Canadian citizen residing in Ventura California.

A second independent translation was begun in 1978 by Mr. George Toth of Czechoslovakia, at the University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS. Mr. Toth completed pages 145-229 before having to return to Europe. The final portion of the second translation (pages 230-275) was done in 1979 by Ms. Elizabeth Bull of the Foriegn Language Department at Mississippi State University.

The independent translations were compared against one another in preparing this English version for publication. Editing in English and manuscript preparation of the Introduction and First Part was done by Mr. Robert Fritzius at Starkville Mississippi..

A number of difficult passages in the Introduction and First Part were cleared up in 1980 by Maria Arun Kumar, also of the Foreign Language Department at Mississippi State University. One crucial, but arcanely composed sentence, at the end of the article's first page, was graciously resolved by the Department Head, Edmund A. Emplaincourt. (It would appear that Ritz was composing in German but writing in French. According to George Toth, there has to be a German original somewhere.)

The Second Part was edited from the independent translations (translations checked in the process) and converted to electronic format by Dr. Yefim Bakman, at bakmanyef@gmail.com, of Tel Aviv University, Israel. Final English smoothing was done by Robert Fritzius. The Second Part files, including html versions, were installed on this website in January 2005.

Sections 5, 6, and 7 of the First Part were prepared as doc and html files and installed on the website in March 2005.

Readers should note that the Second Part of this work is not Ritz's better mousetrap. It is a step in that direction but Ritz was using emission theory with ficticious particles which were not affected by their environment. (This was to be consistent with the superposition principle.) Ritz used his (action without reaction) fictitious particles to re-model Maxwell-Lorentz electrodynamics. At various places he explains that what is being presented is not consistent with his theory, which would have fictious particles being acted on by charges in the medium through which they travel. (This amounts to a departure from the superposition principle.)

John G. Fox, Evidence Against Emission Theories, Am. J. Phys., 33, 1 (1965)

Also see Fox's 1975 letter about the Ritz translation.

Alberto Martinez, Ritz, Einstein, and the Emission Hypothesis, Physics in Perspective, 6, 4, (2004). NADS abstract is online at: http://http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2004PhP.....6....4M