  The teaching of modern physics often uses the history of physics as a
didactic tool. However, as in this process the history of physics is not
something studied but used, there is a danger that the history itself will be
distorted in, as Butterfield calls it, a "Whiggish" way, when the present
becomes the measure of the past. It is not surprising that reading today a
paper written more than a hundred years ago, we can extract much more of it
than was actually thought or dreamed by the author himself. We demonstrate this
Whiggish approach on the example of Woldemar Voigt's 1887 paper. From the
modern perspective, it may appear that this paper opens a way to both the
special relativity and to its anisotropic Finslerian generalization which came
into the focus only recently, in relation with the Cohen and Glashow's very
special relativity proposal. With a little imagination, one can connect Voigt's
paper to the notorious Einstein-Poincare priority dispute, which we believe is
a Whiggish late time artifact. We use the related historical circumstances to
give a broader view on special relativity, than it is usually anticipated.
