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The short answer is "intuition, based on many years of experience."big dream said:Yes, sir that would be very useful.
The long answer is: I recognized that, for an observer moving to the left with a constant velocity c, the spatial coordinate in his frame of reference, X=x+ct (the X axis is also moving to the left with the observer) has constant density at every value of X (i.e., at each value of X, the density is not changing with time), since ##\rho=\rho(x+ct)=\rho(X)##. Basically, in the x frame of reference the density profile is traveling to the left like a wave moving at speed c, but in the X frame of reference, the density profile is stationary. This automatically led mathematically to the transformation of independent variables that we used.