In The Ether, We Find a Free Download of Napoleon Hill's "Vibration of Thought"
Author, Napoleon Hill was born into a poor family in 1883. As a teenager, he became a reporter for several small newspapers. He had visions of becoming a lawyer, and did in fact enter law school, but financial constraints soon forced him to withdraw.
Then in 1908, industrialist Andrew Carnegie commissioned Hill to interview hundreds of successful men and women, in an effort to restate Carnegie’s tenets of success as a clear-cut formula.
Hill interviewed the most famous (and richest) people of the early twentieth century, publishing the “Success Formula” in his 1928 book, “The Law of Success”. Hill revealed additional information on his Success Formula in his more famous, “Think and Grow Rich” (TGR), published in 1937. According to one authority on the book, to date it has sold over 60 million copies.
Over the years, I received two separate copies of TGR, each given to me by a business associate. Although I was initially attracted to the book, I also felt compelled to share the information with others and thus gave each of my copies away.
Recently, while listening to an audio file of Esther Hicks channeling Abraham, they reintroduced TGR to me. What stimulated my interest was mention of the new “Original Version, Restored and Revised”, now available as a free download at the link to the title.
Not stopping long enough to realize “revised” is a contradiction to the term “restored”, I bought a copy. Although I did not have a copy of the original 1937 text at the time, Abraham mentioned that over the years, a series of editors had stripped Hill’s original, more spiritual verbiage from the book. Thus, by the time of Hill’s death in 1970, TGR had a very different feeling than the original.
Supposedly, the latest editor had restored these spiritual references in this latest publication, as sanctioned by the Napoleon Hill Foundation. While reading the “restored/revised” version, I also read every footnote, to see what additional information I might glean. In doing so, I was dismayed to find that the editor took it upon himself to revise more than he restored. For example, the editor’s footnote on Hill’s term, “vibration of thought”, includes mention of the “imperfection” of Hill’s explanation. Later, he discredits Hill’s use of the term “the ether ” (aether) as 
obsolete, given current scientific knowledge.
Rather than criticizing these and many other important terms used by Hill, it might be better if the editor were to embrace Hill’s writings in the “spirit" that they were intended. Scientists and metaphysicians now agree that thought is indeed “vibrational” in nature. Rather than passing off the concept of “the ether” as flawed, is it not possible that the energetic “strings” of string theory connect through a medium we might call “the ether”. Is it too “far out” to think that the strings are “vibrations of thought” and their medium is “the ether”?
At about the time I began to feel that the “restored and revised” TGR was “over-revised” and “under-restored”, I located a free download of the original TGR manuscript at the Wayback Machine website. 
If you go there, you may ormay not locate the 1937 “Think & Grow Rich” as a download. (Since this article was written in 2008, the content of the Web has been decimated). There is no requirement to join anything or receive emails of any kind. Simply download and read the “true word” of Napoleon Hill.
If, however, you remember Hill’s words, that you cannot expect to benefit from “receiving” without also “giving”, you might want to donate a few dollars to Archive.org. Given that any trade paperback edition of TGR costs almost twenty dollars, a free download is a remarkable value.
In researching this article, I came across one website that offered to “license” the reprinting and reselling of Hill’s original TGR for “only $19.95”. Since the original TGR is in the public domain, this con artist’s desire to make “something for nothing” appears to be in direct contradiction of Hill’s tenet that one must give, in order to receive. Perhaps that website should also be selling biographies of P.T. Barnum, who coined the phrase, “There is a sucker born every minute”.
