York Harbor I saw on my right Castle Garden; it looked the same as it
did fifteen years before, when I first entered on the immigrant ship,
and it reminded me of that earlier day. I said to my bride, who was
standing by my side, that I did not carry much more money into New
York Harbor than I did fifteen years before, when I first looked upon
Castle Garden, and yet I felt as rich as a Crœsus. I felt, I told
her, that I owned the whole of the United States, because I was sure
that the United States owned me; that I had an ideal American bride,
who had assured me that I had lived up to the standards of an ideal
American bridegroom; and that I had a fine position in a great American
institution and strong hopes of filling it to everybody’s satisfaction.
I enumerated all these and other things to my bride and wound up by
saying, jokingly: “I have also some prospects which modesty prevents me
from mentioning,” and then I added: “These are the only worldly goods
with which I thee endow.”
X
THE FIRST PERIOD OF MY ACADEMIC CAREER AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
The new “Department of Electrical Engineering in the School of Mines
of Columbia College” had announced its courses of instruction quite a
number of months before I arrived in New York. The late Francis Bacon
Crocker, at that time the newly appointed instructor in electrical
engineering and my future colleague and life-long friend, had been
consulted with regard to these courses, and he was most liberal to
the theoretical side, which was to be my share of the instruction.
He attached much importance to the fundamental theory, although he
was a practical engineer. The new department was to be independent of
the other scientific departments. We had some difficulty, however, in
maintaining that independence; the older departments of engineering
showed a disposition to claim some right of guardianship over the new
infant department. For instance, many chemists thought that electrical
engineering was largely chemistry on account of the storage batteries,
the galvanic cells, and the electrochemical processes which formed an
important part of the electrical operations in the early history of
applied electricity. Others asserted that, since mechanical engineering
attended to the design and the construction of electromagnetic
generators and to the power plant which furnished the driving power,
electrical engineering was, therefore, largely mechanical engineering.
Crocker and I maintained that there is an electrical science which
is the real soul of electrical engineering, and that every other
abstract science or its application was an incident only in electrical
engineering. We won out in spite of the fact that at other institutions
of higher learning in the United States electrical engineering was
taught in the departments of physics or of mechanical engineering.
But it was not an easy matter in those days to persuade people that
the electrical science with its applications was then, or that it
ever would be, big enough to need a department of its own, like, for
instance, civil engineering.
A small brick shed, a temporary structure, had been built at Columbia
College to accommodate the new department. The students called it the
“cowshed,” and the boy who invented the name did not indulge in any
stretching of his imagination. It certainly looked like a cowshed. The
laboratory equipment consisted of a dynamo, a motor, and an alternator,
with some so-called practical measuring instruments. When I compared
the facilities of the new “Department of Electrical Engineering at
Columbia College” with that of the Polytechnic School in Berlin, I
felt somewhat humbled, but not discouraged. I said to Crocker: “Our
guns are small and few in number; the men behind the guns will have to
expand much beyond their present size if this department is to make any
impression upon the electrical art.” “Pupin,” said Crocker, “you have
no idea how rapidly a young fellow grows when he tries to teach a new
subject to poorly prepared beginners.”
Crocker and I were given to understand that any additional equipment
during the first year would have to be bought from contributions
outside of the university. We raised some money by giving a course of
twelve popular lectures for which we charged ten dollars per person.
Each lecture lasted two hours; we were somewhat dubious about their
quality, and so we provided a generous quantity. We raised in this
manner three hundred dollars and bought additional equipment, but no
two young scientists ever worked harder to earn three hundred dollars.
The experience, however, was worth many times that amount. Our audience
consisted of business men and lawyers, who were either interested in
the electrical industries, or expected to become interested. They had
hardly any previous scientific training. It took much judgment and
skill to talk science to these people without shooting much above their
heads. Every one of them believed that the electrical science was in
its infancy, and that most of its useful applications were obtained
empirically by a rule of thumb. When we told them that the electrical
science was one of the most exact of all physical sciences, some shook
their heads and exhibited considerable scepticism. One of them asked
me: “Doctor, do you know what electricity is?” “No,” said I, and he
added another question: “Then how can you have an exact science of
electricity when you do not even know what electricity is?” To this
I retorted: “Do you know what matter is? Of course you do not, nor
does anybody else know it, and yet who will deny that there are exact
sciences relating to material things? Do you deny that astronomy is an
exact science?” It is a difficult thing to make unscientific people
understand that science studies first and foremost the _activities of
things and not their ultimate nature_.
In that first course of public lectures I found it necessary to devote
much of my exposition to the correction of erroneous notions lodged in
the minds of my audience. When I told that audience that no electrical
generator generates electricity, because electricity was made by God
and, according to Faraday, its quantity in the universe is constant,
and that for every positive charge there is an equal negative one,
most members of my audience were inclined to think that I was talking
metaphysics. “Then what does it generate?” asked one of my hearers.
I answered: “It generates motion of electricity, and by that motion
it furnishes us with means of doing useful work like telegraphy,
telephony, and electrical lighting.” Then I added: “The electrical
science studies the forces which make electricity move against the
reactions of the bodies through which it moves; in the overcoming of
these reactions the moving electricity does useful work.” Illustrations
from dynamics of material bodies did not help very much, because my
audience had hardly any knowledge of even the elements of Newton’s
great work, although Newton considered these elements obvious truths.
All they knew about Newton was that he had “discovered gravitation.”
When I told them that Newton had discovered the law of gravitational
action and not gravitation itself, they thought that I was splitting
hairs. I was never quite sure that those good people had carried away
much knowledge from my lectures, but I was quite sure that they had
left much knowledge with me. In trying to straighten out their notions
I straightened out my own very considerably. Crocker was right when he
said: “You have no idea how rapidly a young fellow grows when he tries
to teach a new subject to poorly prepared beginners.” That was the real
profit from our first course of public lectures.
Every cultured person is expected to have an intelligent view of
literature, of the fine arts, and of the social sciences, which is
as it should be. But who has ever thought of suggesting that culture
demands an intelligent view of the primary concepts in fundamental
sciences? If cultured people had it, there would be no need to renew
periodically the tiresome topic of the alleged clash between science
and religion, and there would be much more straight thinking about
things in general. Every child in the public schools should be made
perfectly familiar with the simple experiments which illustrate the
fundamental elements of Newton’s divine philosophy, as Milton calls
science. Barnard, Joseph Henry, Andrew White, and the other leaders
of scientific thought in the United States, who started the great
movement in favor of higher scientific research and of a better
scientific education, had a difficult up-hill pull, because people in
high places lacked an intelligent view of science. A famous lawyer, a
trustee of a great educational institution, looked surprised when I
told him, over thirty years ago, that one cannot teach science without
laboratories both for the elementary and for the advanced instruction.
He actually believed that graduate schools in science needed only a lot
of blackboards, chalk, and sponges, and a lecturer who could prepare
his lectures by reading books. He believed what he thought would suit
him best, namely, that a university should be built on the top of a
heap of chalk, sponges, and books. These instrumentalities are cheaper
than laboratories, and that appeals to many university trustees. The
teacher who can lecture from books and not from his experience in the
laboratory is also much cheaper. But heaven help the country which
trusts its destiny to cheap men operating with cheap instrumentalities.
I gave that trustee a lecture by reciting the sermon which Tyndall
preached in the “Summary and Conclusions” of his famous lectures of
1872-1873. I was bold enough to deliver several of these lectures to
men in high places. Some liked them and some did not, but they all
agreed that I had my own opinions upon the subject and was not afraid
to express them.
The American Institute of Electrical Engineers had heard of my somewhat
novel opinions regarding the teaching of the electrical science in
its bearing upon electrical engineering, and it invited me to give
an address upon the subject at its annual meeting in Boston, in the
summer of 1890. The address was entitled “Practical Aspects of the
Alternating Current Theory.” It was a eulogy of the electrical
science, and particularly of Faraday, Maxwell, and Joseph Henry on the
purely scientific side, and of the technical men who were developing
the system of electrical power distribution by alternating electrical
forces. I noticed that my audience was divided into two distinct
groups; one group was cordial and appreciative, but the other was
as cold as ice. The famous electrical engineer and inventor, Elihu
Thomson, was in the friendly group, and he looked me up after the
address and congratulated me cordially. That was a great encouragement
and I felt happy. Another man, a well-known physicist and engineer,
also looked me up, and asked me whether I really expected that students
of electrical engineering could ever be trusted to swallow and digest
all the mathematical stuff which I had presented in my address. The
“mathematical stuff” to which he referred was a very elementary
theoretical illustration. I thought of my chums, the tripos youngsters
at Cambridge, and of their wonderful capacity for swallowing and
digesting “mathematical stuff,” but said nothing; the man who was
addressing me was one of those people who had a small opinion of the
capacity and willingness of our American boys to “swallow and digest”
just as much “mathematical stuff” as their English cousins do.
A short time prior to my return to Columbia College, in 1889, a bitter
polemic had been carried on in the New York newspapers concerning the
two methods of electrical power distribution, the _direct_ and the
_alternating_ current method. The New York interests favored the first,
and another group, including the Westinghouse Company, supported the
alternating current method. The opponents of the latter method called
it the “deadly alternating current,” and did their best to discredit
it. They actually succeeded, I was told, in persuading the State
authorities to install an alternating current machine at the Sing Sing
prison, to be used in electrocution. When in my address at Boston I
recited my eulogy of the alternating current system I did not know of
this bitter polemic, but when I heard of it I understood the chilliness
among a part of my audience.
In the following autumn I was made to understand that my address
in Boston had made a bad impression, and that it had offended the
feelings of some _big_ men who were interested in the electrical
industries. I could not help seeing the glaring hint that the new
“Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia College” was to
suffer from the fact that one of its two instructors was accused of
an unpardonable “electrical heresy.” The great and mighty person who
broached this matter to me suggested that perhaps the easiest way out
of this difficulty was my resignation. “Very well,” said I, “I will
certainly resign if the trustees of Columbia College, who appointed
me, find me guilty of a scientific heresy.” The trustees never heard
of this incident, but my colleague Crocker did, and he said in his
characteristic manner: “There are many persons to-day who would not
hesitate to burn the witch of Salem, but no persons of that kind are on
the board of trustees of Columbia College.” Crocker was a Cape Cod man
and he had a very soft spot for the witch of Salem.
The notion among many captains of industry that the electrical science
was in its infancy, and that it worked by the rule of thumb, made it
possible to launch an opposition of that kind against the introduction
of the alternating current system of electrical distribution of power.
Tesla’s alternating current motor and Bradley’s rotary transformer
for changing alternating currents into direct were available at that
time. The electrical art was ready then to do many of the things which
it is doing to-day so well, if it had not been for the opposition of
people who were afraid that they would have to scrap some of their
direct current apparatus and the plants for manufacturing it, if the
alternating current system received any support. A most un-American
mental attitude! It was clear to every impartial and intelligent expert
that the two systems supplemented each other in a most admirable
manner, and that the advancement of one would also advance the other.
Men like Elihu Thomson and my colleague Crocker knew that, but
ignorance and false notions prevailed in the early nineties, because
the captains of electrical industries paid small attention to highly
trained electrical scientists. That explains why in those days the
barbarous steel cables were still employed to drag cars along Third
Avenue, New York, and why in 1893 I saw the preparatory work on
Columbus Avenue, New York, for installing additional barbarous steel
ropes to drag street-cars. But, fortunately, electrical traction came
to the rescue of Columbus Avenue.
During the summer of 1893 I had the good fortune to meet, quite often,
William Barclay Parsons, the distinguished engineer, the future builder
of the first New York subway, and to-day the distinguished chairman
of the Board of Trustees of Columbia University. He passed the summer
vacation at Atlantic Highlands, and I at Monmouth Beach, and we used
the same steamboat in our occasional trips to New York. His head was
full of schemes for the solution of the New York rapid-transit problem,
but I observed that his ideas were not quite clear on the question of
the electrical power transmission to be employed. A very few years
later his ideas had cleared wonderfully. He had visited Budapest in
1894 and had seen there surface cars operated electrically and most
satisfactorily by an underground trolley. It was a most instructive
object-lesson, but how humiliating it was to the engineering pride
of the great United States to consult little Hungary in electrical
engineering! The electrical power transmission system employed to-day
in the New York subways is practically the same which had been
proposed to and accepted by Parsons, the chief engineer, not so many
years after our trips to New York, in 1893; it is the electrical
power transmission consisting of a combination of the alternating and
direct current systems. No fundamentally novel methods were employed
which did not exist at the time when the alternating current machine
was installed at Sing Sing for the purpose of electrocuting people by
the “deadly alternating current.” In less than five years a radical
change in popular notions had taken place about a matter which was well
understood from the very first by men of higher scientific training,
like Stillwell, the chief engineer of the Niagara Power Company, and
Sprague, the well-known pioneer in electrical traction, the inventor of
the multiple unit system, without which our subway would be practicably
impossible.
Four historical events, very important in the annals of the electrical
science in the United States, had happened in rapid succession between
1890 and 1894. The first was the successful electrical transmission of
power between Lauffen and Frankfurt, in Germany, in 1891; it employed
the alternating current system. The second was the decision of the
Niagara Falls Power and Construction Company to employ the alternating
current system for the transmission of its electrical power; Professor
Henry Augustus Rowland, of Johns Hopkins University, as consulting
expert of the company, favored this system; another consulting
scientific expert, the famous Lord Kelvin, favored the direct current
system. The third historical event was the consolidation of the Edison
General Electric Company with the Thomson-Houston Company of Lynn,
Massachusetts. This consolidation meant the end of the opposition to
the alternating current system on the part of people who were most
influential in the electrical industries. No such opposition could
exist in an electrical corporation where Elihu Thomson’s expert
opinion had any weight. The fourth historical event was the Electrical
Congress at the World Exposition in Chicago, in 1893. Helmholtz came
over as an official delegate of the German Empire, and was elected
honorary president of the congress. The subjects discussed at that
congress, and the men who discussed them, showed that the electrical
science was not in its infancy, and that electrical things were not
done by the rule of thumb.
Once I asked Professor Rowland whether anybody had ever suggested to
him resigning from Johns Hopkins University on the ground that in
favoring the alternating current system for the Niagara Falls Power
Transmission plant he had made himself liable to a charge of heresy.
“Heresy?” said he; “I thought that my heresy was worth a big fee, and
when the company attempted to cut it down the courts sustained my
claim.” An interesting bit of history is attached to this. When the
Niagara Power and Construction Company objected to the size of the fee
which Rowland charged for his services as scientific adviser, and asked
for a reduction, the matter was referred to the court. During Rowland’s
cross-examination the defendant’s lawyer, the late Joseph Choate, asked
him the question: “Who, in your opinion, is the greatest physicist in
the United States?” Rowland answered without a moment’s hesitation: “I
am.” The judge smiled, but agreed with the witness, and his agreement
was in harmony with the opinion of all scientific men. Rowland
justified his apparently egotistical answer by the fact that as a
witness on the stand he was under oath to speak the truth; he certainly
spoke the truth when he testified that he was the leading physicist in
the United States.
Rowland’s interest in the electrical science and its technical
applications helped much to dissipate the notion, entertained by
many, that it was empirical and still in its infancy. Bogus inventors
always encouraged this superstition. The attention which Rowland and
his former pupil, the late Doctor Louis Duncan, devoted to electrical
engineering at Johns Hopkins University helped much to raise the
status of electrical engineering. When the new General Electric
Company was organized by the consolidation of the Edison General
Electric Company and the Thomson-Houston Company, Elihu Thomson
became the chief scientific adviser of the new corporation, and its
highest court of appeals in scientific matters. I remember telling my
colleague, Crocker, that if the Thomson-Houston Company had contributed
nothing else than Elihu Thomson to the new corporation it would have
contributed more than enough. Thomson, in my opinion, was the American
Siemens, and Rowland was the American Helmholtz, of the new era in
the history of American industries--the era of close co-operation
between abstract science and engineering. With these two men among the
leaders of the electrical science and the electrical industry in the
United States, the senseless opposition to the alternating current
system of power distribution began to wane. It vanished quickly after
the Electrical Congress of 1893. The first visible result of the
co-operation between abstract science and the technical arts was the
splendid power plant at Niagara Falls, and later the electrical power
distribution system in the New York subways, in which the alternating
and the direct current systems supplemented each other most admirably.
[Illustration: HENRY AUGUSTUS ROWLAND (1848-1901)
First Director of the Physics Laboratory of Johns
Hopkins University]
The scientific spirit of Rowland’s laboratory and lecture-room was
felt everywhere in the electrical industries; it was felt also in our
educational institutions. His and his students’ researches in solar
spectra and in other problems of higher physics made that spirit the
dominating influence among the rising generation of physical science in
America. It was universally acknowledged that Johns Hopkins was a real
university. The intellectual movement in favor of higher scientific
research, first inaugurated by Joseph Henry, President Barnard
of Columbia College, and Doctor John William Draper, in the early
seventies, was marching on steadily under the leadership of Rowland
when I started my academic career at Columbia, thirty-four years ago,
and he led on like a “doughty knight of Troy,” as Maxwell used to call
him. It was the spirit of Johns Hopkins which inspired the generation
of the early nineties in its encouragement of the movement for the
development of the American university. Some enthusiasts at Columbia
College went even so far as to advocate the abolition of the college
curriculum and the substitution of a Columbia University for Columbia
College; I was not among these enthusiasts, because I knew only too
well the historical value of Columbia College and of other American
colleges. What would the University of Cambridge be without its ancient
colleges? College lays the foundation for higher citizenship; the
university lays the foundation for higher learning.
[Illustration: _By courtesy of the Columbia University Library_
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL (1831-1879)
First Director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge
University]