Length contraction was proposed by George FitzGerald in 1889, in response to the Michelson-Morley experiment, and it gained greater circulation in the physicist community after Hendrik Lorentz independently proposed it in 1892. I imagine that most top physicists would have been familiar with it by 1901. Lorentz’s paper included the ideas that the relative motion of reference frames was important, and that funny things were going on with time (like non-simultaneity in different reference frames), and his 1899 follow-up included time dilation equations (as did a less-known 1897 paper by Joseph Larmor). I’m not sure if people familiar with this work saw c as the universal speed limit, but the length contraction equations (which imply imaginary length for v greater than c) suggest that this proposal wouldn’t strike them as crazy (and they would have recognized the number as c, since estimates of the speed of light were accurate within less than 0.1% by then).
Length contraction was proposed by George FitzGerald in 1889, in response to the Michelson-Morley experiment, and it gained greater circulation in the physicist community after Hendrik Lorentz independently proposed it in 1892. I imagine that most top physicists would have been familiar with it by 1901. Lorentz’s paper included the ideas that the relative motion of reference frames was important, and that funny things were going on with time (like non-simultaneity in different reference frames), and his 1899 follow-up included time dilation equations (as did a less-known 1897 paper by Joseph Larmor). I’m not sure if people familiar with this work saw c as the universal speed limit, but the length contraction equations (which imply imaginary length for v greater than c) suggest that this proposal wouldn’t strike them as crazy (and they would have recognized the number as c, since estimates of the speed of light were accurate within less than 0.1% by then).