In the thread "Cosmic Entropy" Orac posted a link to an interesting article. The following quote from that article might be appropriate to the OP in this thread.

"Years before relativity, Lorentz actually managed to prove that Maxwell's equations were Lorentz-invariant but he couldn't possibly understand that the transformations ("changes of variables") formed a group (which we call the Lorentz group today - because there's no way to avoid this irony) or that it had anything to do with the Galilean choices of the inertial frames. Einstein was necessary for these advances that may look trivial today."

There never was nothing.