life in college there is much which sounds like a glorification of
muscle and of the fighting spirit. I feel almost like apologizing
for it, but do I really owe an apology? My whole life up to this
point of my story was steered by conditions which demanded muscle and
the fighting spirit. To pass six weeks during each one of several
summers as herdsman’s assistant in company with twelve other lively
Serb youngsters as fellow assistants, meant violent competitions in
wrestling, swimming, herdsman’s hockey, and other strenuous games for
hours and hours each day, and one’s position in this lively community
depended entirely upon muscle and the fighting spirit. Magyarism in
Panchevo and Teutonism in Prague produced a reaction which appealed
to muscle and to the fighting spirit, which finally drove me to the
land of Lincoln. Muscle and the fighting spirit of the bootblacks and
newsboys on Broadway met me on the very first day when I ventured
to pass beyond the narrow confines of Castle Garden, in order to
catch my first glimpse of the great American metropolis. No sooner
had I finished serving my apprenticeship as greenhorn, and advanced
to a higher civic level, than I encountered again muscle and the
fighting spirit of the college boys. In the beginning of my college
career I found very little difference between the pasture-lands of my
native village and the campus of the American college. The spirit of
playfulness and the ferment of life in the hearts of youth were the
same in both, and were manifested in the same way, namely, in athletics
which encourage a glorification of muscle and of the fighting spirit.
This was most fortunate for me, because it offered me a wide avenue
by which I could enter with perfect ease into that wonderful activity
called college life. Other avenues existed, but to a Serbian youth who
but a few years before had been a herdsman’s assistant these other
avenues were practically closed. I have described the avenue which
was open to me, but with no intention to indulge in an egotistical
glorification of that avenue.
Rutherfurd, my mentor, scholar, scientist, and trustee of Columbia
College, did not believe as some people do that athletics would ever
cause our colleges to degenerate into gladiatorial schools. Athletics
in the form of wrestling and boxing did not interfere in the least
with my scholarship. Healthy young people and healthy young nations
are prone to worship the heroic element in human life, thought trustee
Rutherfurd, and, according to him, the Greeks, by the art of physical
culture, prevented this exuberance of youth from degenerating into
brutality. He was longing forty years ago, and I am still longing
to-day, for the time when American colleges will have a four years’
course in physical culture, conducted by medical and athletic experts.
His sons, he thought, practised this art by their devotion to the game
of racquets and of steeplechase riding. They were splendid athletes,
but nevertheless they were mellow-hearted and gentle youths. The fact
that their scholarship was not high did not disturb their learned
father, because much of his own scholarship and scientific learning,
he told me, had been acquired long after he had graduated from Williams
College.
Many of my fellow students were, just like myself, very fond of
athletics and of other activities outside of the college curriculum,
and yet we were enthusiastic students of Greek literature, of history
and economics, of constitutional history of the United States, and of
English literature. But here was the secret: Professor Merriam was a
wonderful expounder of the great achievements of Greek civilization;
Professor Monroe Smith made every one of us feel that history was an
indispensable part of our daily life; Professor Richmond Mayo-Smith
made us believe that political economy was one of the most important
subjects in the world; and Professor Burgess’ lectures on the
Constitutional History of the United States made us all imagine that
we understood the spirit of 1776 just as well as Hamilton did. These
professors were the great scholars of Columbia College when I was a
student there, and they had most attractive personalities too. The
personality of the professors, like that of the famous Van Amringe,
and their learning, like that of the venerable President Barnard,
were the best safeguards for students who showed a tendency to
devote themselves too much to the worship of muscle and the fighting
spirit, and of activities outside of the college curriculum. Fill
your professorial chairs in colleges with men of broad learning, and
of commanding personality, and do not worry about the alleged evil
influences of athletics, and of other college activities outside of
the recitation-room. That was the recommendation of trustee Rutherfurd
forty years ago; to-day I add: the college needs great professors just
as much as the various research departments of a university need them;
perhaps even more.
Literary societies, college journalism, glee-club practice, and
exercises in the dramatic art consumed, when I was a college student,
just as much of the college student’s time as athletics did. They
and athletics constituted the outside college activities. The
recitation-room brought the student into touch with the personalities
of the professors; college activities outside of the recitation-room,
whether they were athletics or anything else, brought the student
into touch with the personalities of his fellow students. Each one
of these influences had, according to the experiences of my college
life, its own great value, and contributed its distinct share to what
is usually called the character-forming of the college student, but
what Rutherfurd, the Columbia College trustee, called training in the
principles of conduct becoming an American who is loyal to the best
traditions of his country. Neither one nor the other influence can be
weakened without crippling seriously that great object which trustee
Rutherfurd called “the historical mission of the American college.”
There was another educational activity which should be mentioned
here. My regular attendance at Plymouth Church I considered one of
my most important college activities outside of the recitation-room.
Beecher’s sermons and Booth’s interpretations of Shakespeare were
sources of stirring inspiration. They occupied a very high place among
my spiritual guides. Beecher, Booth, and several other men of genius
who were active in New York in those days were, as far as my college
training was concerned, members of the Columbia College faculty. This
is what I probably meant when I said to my friends at the Adelphi
Academy that “Columbia College in the City of New York” was the port
for which I was sailing and that Beecher’s church in Brooklyn was a
component part of Columbia College. Taking college activities in this
broader sense I always believed that the spiritual, intellectual, and
artistic activities in the city of New York were component parts of
Columbia College; they certainly contributed much to the fulness of
my college life. I often wondered whether this was in the minds of
those who framed the official name “Columbia College in the City of New
York,” when the old name “King’s College” was abandoned in 1787.
* * * * *
I have nearly finished the story of my college career, and I am aware
that it is silent on a subject which was always dear to my heart; that
subject is science. A young lad who was stimulated so much by the lives
of the men represented in the Cooper Union library painting, entitled
“Men of Progress”; by the splendid scientific exhibits in Philadelphia
in 1876; by Jim’s boiler-room demonstrations supplemented by Cooper
Union lectures on heat; by Tyndall’s and Hunt’s poetic descriptions of
scientific achievements; and above all by his own visions concerning
physical phenomena on the pasture-lands of his native village--that lad
goes through college, and the story of his college career is nearly
closed without saying anything about his scientific studies at Columbia
College! That certainly looks strange, and suggests the inference that
after all Bilharz had finally succeeded in tearing me away completely
from what he called the worship of scientific materialism. Bilharz did
not succeed in that, but what he actually did is worth relating here.
After my departure from Cortlandt Street, Bilharz felt quite lonesome
and tried to get companionship and consolation from a Tyrolean zither
which he managed well in spite of his stiff fingers. Knowing my
fondness for Homer’s heroic verse and for the lyric verse in the chorus
of Greek dramas, he practised reciting them with zither accompaniment.
He thus imitated most successfully a Serbian guslar’s recitations of
old Serbian ballads, accompanied by the single-string instrument,
called _gusle_. In recognition of the success of his clever scheme,
which, I was sure, he had devised for my special benefit, I called him
the Greek guslar. He who has seen huge multitudes of Serbs assembled
around a blind guslar in the midst of some great festive gathering,
listening by the hour in spellbound silence to his recitations, will
understand how Bilharz managed to attract me to many a neighborhood
gathering on the top loft of the Cortlandt Street factory. Every
time I listened to the zither accompanying his chanting of familiar
Greek verses I imagined that Baba Batikin’s spirit was transferred
from the little peasant village of Idvor to the great metropolis of
America! Whenever I told him that, he seemed to be immensely pleased,
because the life of a blind guslar appealed to him much. Professor
Merriam was certainly a great Greek scholar, but Bilharz was a great
Greek guslar, and when he chanted the verses of the Iliad with zither
accompaniment I was tempted to imagine that he was a reincarnation of
Homer. Between Bilharz and Merriam I could not help devoting much of
my time in college to the study of Greek. I have never regretted it,
but I do regret that the academic halls of the American colleges of
to-day do not resound any more with that solemn Greek rhythm which I
first heard on the top loft of the Cortlandt Street factory. Bilharz
disappeared from Cortlandt Street a short time before I graduated, and
he left me his zither as a souvenir, and also an old edition of Homer’s
Iliad by the famous German philologist Dindorf. I have not seen him
since that time, but I shall never forget him. He was the first to call
my attention to an old and magnificent civilization, the spiritual
beauty of which appealed to my young imagination with increasing force
as my knowledge of it increased. I often recall his almost fanatical
dislike of mechanisms, and wonder what he would say to-day if he
heard the pianola, the phonograph, and some of the distortions of
radio broadcasting, to say nothing of the dramatic atrocities of the
kinematograph!
On the other hand, the growth of my understanding from the first day
of my landing at Castle Garden was due to my feeding upon the spiritual
food offered to me daily by a civilization in which I was living, and
which I wished to understand but did not understand. My preparation
for college lifted here and there the mist which prevented my vision
from seeing the clear outline of American civilization. Columbia
College brought me into touch with the college life of American boys
and with men of great learning and wonderful personalities, and they
helped me to dispel every particle of that mist, and there in the clear
sunshine of their learning I saw the whole image of what I believed to
be American civilization: a beautiful daughter of a beautiful mother,
which is the Anglo-Saxon civilization. The memory of this vision always
recalled to my mind the ode of Horace which opens with the line:
“O matre pulchra filia pulchrior!”
The study and the contemplation of these two civilizations, the ancient
civilization of Greece and the new civilization of the Anglo-Saxons,
which appealed to me as the two greatest civilizations of human
history, made every other study in my college curriculum appear
insignificant, although I gained several prizes in the exact sciences,
and although I never gave up the idea that my future work would be in
the field of science.
But there is another and perhaps the most potent reason why science
figures so little in the preceding part of the story of my college
career. Instruction in the exact sciences in those days was most
elementary, not only at Columbia College but also in most American
colleges. For instance, laboratory work in physics and in chemistry was
not a part of the Columbia College curriculum, and the lecture-room
told me less about physics than I had known from my studies of
Tyndall’s popular publications and from the Cooper Union instruction
before I entered college. The question “What is Light?” I brought with
me from the pasture-lands of my native village, and the professor of
physics at Columbia College offered no answer to it except to refer to
vibrations in an ether, the physical properties of which he admitted
he could not satisfactorily describe. On this point he did not seem
to be much wiser than my humble teacher Kos in Panchevo. My mentor,
Rutherfurd, was always interested in this question, as in many other
advanced questions in science, and he took much delight in discussing
them with me. He was the first to inform me that the great question,
“What is Light?” would probably be answered when we understood more
clearly a new electrical theory advanced by a Scotch physicist, Maxwell
by name, who was a pupil of the great Faraday.
One day toward the end of my senior year I told my mentor, Rutherfurd,
of a lecture-room experiment performed by Rood, his friend, at that
time professor of physics at Columbia College. This experiment was the
first announcement to me that Faraday was one of the great discoverers
in electrical science. The experiment was simplicity itself, and
consisted of a loose coil of copper wire, held in the left hand of the
lecturing professor, the terminals of the coil being connected to a
galvanometer supported on the wall of the lecture-room, so that its
needle could be seen by every student in the room. When Rood, like
a magician manipulating a wand, moved with his right hand a small
magnet toward the coil, the distant galvanometer needle, impelled by
a force which up to that time was a mystery to me, swung violently in
one direction, and when the magnet was moved away from the coil the
galvanometer needle swung just as violently in the opposite direction.
When one terminal, only, of the coil was connected to the galvanometer,
and thus the electric circuit of the coil was broken, the motion of
the magnet produced no effect. “_This is Faraday’s discovery of
Electromagnetic Induction._” said Rood with a deep sigh, and ended
the lecture without any further comment, as if he wished to give me
a chance to think it over before he added additional information.
Rutherfurd knew Rood’s picturesque mannerism, and my description of
the experiment amused him. He suggested that the good professor was
very fond of mystifying his students. I certainly was much mystified
and did not wait for the next lecture to clear the mystery, but spent
all day and most of the night reading about Faraday’s wonderful
discovery. It was made over fifty years before that time, but I had
never known anything about it, although Edison’s dynamos in his New
York Pearl Street station had been supplying for over a year thousands
of customers with electric power for incandescent lighting. Columbia
College was not one of these customers for a long time after my
graduation. When I finished my description of the experiment, and
assured Rutherfurd that it was the most thrilling physical phenomenon
that I had ever seen, and that I had remained awake almost all night
after seeing it, he looked pleased, and informed me that this very
phenomenon was the basis of Maxwell’s new Electrical Theory.
That was the experiment which helped me to decide a very weighty
question. Professor Rood had informed me that in recognition of my high
standing in science as well as in letters I could choose either of two
graduate fellowships, one in letters or one in science, each worth
five hundred dollars a year. Either would have meant an additional
three years of graduate study at Columbia. I was much tempted to turn
to letters and continue my work with Merriam, the idol of all Columbia
College students, including myself, who had felt the wonderful charm
of his personality and of his profound and at the same time most
picturesque classical scholarship. But the magic experiment which
had told me the first story of Faraday’s great discoveries, and had
aroused my dormant enthusiasm for physics, caused me to bid good-by
to Merriam and turn to science, my first love. Nevertheless, I did
not accept the fellowship in science and stay three years longer at
Columbia; I preferred to take up the study of Faraday and of Maxwell
in the United Kingdom, where these two great physicists were born
and where they had made their great discoveries. Trustee Rutherfurd
and his young nephew, my chum and classmate, John Armstrong Chanler,
applauded my decision, and promised to assist me in my undertaking
whenever assistance should be needed. Rutherfurd assured me that I
should certainly succeed as well in my scientific studies in European
universities as I had succeeded in my general cultural studies at
Columbia College, if the revelations of the new world of physics,
certainly in store for me, could arouse in me the same enthusiasm which
had been aroused by the revelations of that new spirit and that new
current of thought which had given birth to the American civilization.
That this enthusiasm would not be wanting was amply demonstrated, he
said, by the effect which Faraday’s fundamental experiment had produced
in my imagination.
[Illustration: PHOTOGRAPH OF PUPIN TAKEN IN 1883 WHEN HE GRADUATED
AT COLUMBIA]
Professor Burgess, my teacher in constitutional history, had assured
me, toward the end of the senior year, that I was fully prepared for
American citizenship, and I had applied for my naturalization papers.
I received them on the day before I was graduated. Two ceremonies
which are recorded in my life as two red-letter days took place on two
successive days; it is instructive to give here a brief comparison
between them. The ceremony which made me a citizen of the United States
took place in a dingy little office in one of the municipal buildings
in City Hall Park. I received my diploma of Bachelor of Arts in the
famous old Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street on the following
day. There was nobody in the naturalization office to witness the
naturalization ceremony except myself and a plain little clerk. The
graduation ceremonies in the Academy of Music were presided over by
the venerable President Barnard; his luxuriant snowy-white locks and
long beard, and his luminous intelligence beaming from every feature
of his wonderful face, gave him the appearance of Moses, as Michael
Angelo represents him; and the academy was crowded with a distinguished
and brilliant audience. The little clerk in the office handed me my
naturalization papers in an offhand manner, thinking, apparently,
of nothing but the fee due from me. President Barnard, knowing of
my high standing in the graduating class and of my many struggles
to get there, beamed with joy when he handed me my diploma amidst
the applause of my numerous friends in the audience. When I left the
naturalization office, carrying my precious multicolored and very
ornate naturalization papers, the crowd in City Hall Park was moving
about as though nothing had happened; but when I stepped down from the
academy stage, with my Columbia diploma in hand, my old friend Doctor
Shepard handed me a basket of roses with the best wishes of his family
and of Henry Ward Beecher; Mr. and Mrs. Lukanitch were there, and the
old lady kissed me, shedding tears copiously and assuring me that if my
mother were there to see how well I looked in my academic silk gown she
also would have shed many a tear of joy; numerous other friends were
there and made much fuss over me, but all those things served only to
increase the painful contrast between the gay commencement ceremonies
and the prosy procedure of my naturalization on the preceding day. One
ceremony made me only a Bachelor of Arts. The other made me a citizen
of the United States. Which of the two should have been more solemn?
There was a picture which I had conjured up in my imagination when
first I walked one day from the Cortlandt Street factory to Wall
Street to see the site of old Federal Hall. The picture was that of
Chancellor Livingston administering the constitutional oath of office
to President Washington. To me it was a picture of the most solemn
historical act which New York or any other place in the world ever had
witnessed. When the little clerk in the naturalization office handed me
my naturalization papers, and called upon me in a perfunctory way to
promise that I would always be loyal to the Constitution of the United
States, the picture of that historical scene in Federal Hall suddenly
reappeared to me, and a strange mental exaltation made my voice tremble
as I responded: “I will, so help me God!” The little clerk noticed
my emotion, but did not understand it, because he did not know of my
long-continued efforts throughout a period of nine years to prepare
myself for citizenship of the United States.
* * * * *
As I sat on the deck of the ship which was taking me to the
universities of Europe, and watched its eagerness to get away from the
busy harbor of New York, I thought of the day when, nine years before,
I had arrived on the immigrant ship. I said to myself: “Michael Pupin,
the most valuable asset which you carried into New York harbor nine
years ago was your knowledge of, and profound respect and admiration
for, the best traditions of your race ... the most valuable asset which
you are now taking with you from New York harbor is your knowledge of,
and profound respect and admiration for, the best traditions of your
adopted country.”
V
FIRST JOURNEY TO IDVOR IN ELEVEN YEARS
It was a beautiful June afternoon when from the gay deck of the _State
of Florida_ I saw the low coast-line of Long Island disappear in the
distance. With it disappeared the land the first glimpse of which I
had caught so eagerly on that sunny March morning nine years before,
when the immigrant ship _Westphalia_ carried me into New York harbor.
As I had approached this coast my busy imagination had suggested that
it was the edge of the cover of a great and mysterious book which I
had to read and decipher. I had read it for nine long years, and my
belief that I had deciphered it made me confident that I was quite rich
in learning. Besides, there were my Bachelor of Arts diploma and my
naturalization papers; and, of course, I thought, they were the best
evidence in the world that I was returning to see my mother again rich
in learning and in academic honors, as I had promised her nine years
before in that letter from Hamburg.
The sky was clear, the sea was smooth, and its sharp and even horizon
line toward which the ship was heading promised a peaceful temper of
the powers which controlled the motions of the air above and of the
waters below our ship. The comforts of the ship and the fair prospects
of a fine voyage were recorded in the smiling faces of my fellow
passengers. A group of lively schoolgirls from Washington, making
their first trip to Europe under the guidance of an old professor with
long gray hair and shaggy beard, looked like so many nymphs playing
around a drowsy Neptune. They formed the central group of the happy
passengers. There were a number of college boys on board. Some of
them had friends among the Washington nymphs; by clever manœuvring it
was arranged that the college boys, including myself, should sit at
the same table with the playful nymphs. The gray-locked professor,
whom I called Father Neptune (and the title stuck to him), was
somewhat reluctant at first, but finally he gave his consent to this
“wonderful” proposition, as the girls called it, and he sat at the
head of the table, presiding with a dignity which fully demonstrated
that he deserved the title “Father Neptune.” The jolly captain assured
us that his good old ship never carried a more exuberant company of
youngsters across the Atlantic. But this was not the fierce Atlantic
which I had seen nine years before. It was an Atlantic which apparently
studied to please and to amuse. All kinds of pleasant things happened
during the voyage, as if arranged purposely for our amusement. Many
schools of porpoises approached the merry ship, and I suggested that
they visited us in order to pay their respects to Father Neptune and
his beautiful nymphs. This suggestion was accepted with vociferous
acclamation, and it was agreed that free play be granted to our
imaginations. Let your fancy take any course at your own risk, was
our motto. When the visiting porpoises hustled off like a squadron
of reconnoitring horsemen leaping gaily over the smooth waves, as if
in a merry steeplechase, it was suggested by one of the girls with a
lively imagination that they were anxious to report to the chief of
staff of a great host which, hidden in the depths of the quiescent
Atlantic, controlled the ocean waves. She, the oracle, as we called
her, prophesied that when these heralds had delivered the report that
Father Neptune and his fair nymphs were passing in triumphal procession
through their watery realm, then all things in the heavens above and in
the sea below would bow to the will of Neptune and his playful crew.