attorney, was the president of the American Telephone and Telegraph
Company, I asked him in the course of a conversation whether he would
like to sell me back my invention. “Yes,” said he, “but only if you
will buy the whole telephone company with it. Our whole plant has been
adjusted to the invention, and when one goes the other also must go.
The invention has enabled us to detect many defects in our transmission
system, and if it had done nothing else than that it would have
been worth at least ten times what we paid you. It is the greatest
faultfinder that we ever struck, and it is the only form of faultfinder
for which we have any use.” A progressive industrial organization
courts the criticism of an accurate and friendly faultfinder. It
leads to research and development, and that supplies the vital energy
to every industry. Twenty-five years ago the American Telephone and
Telegraph Company had a small laboratory in Boston, where it did all
its scientific research and development. But, presently, faultfinders
like my inventions moved into the peaceful and drowsy precincts of
that tiny laboratory, and stirred up the engineers and the board
of directors. I am very happy whenever I think that, possibly, my
inventions have contributed some to this healthful stirring up. What
was the result? To-day the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and
the affiliated Western Electric Company employ about three thousand
persons at an expenditure of some nine million dollars annually in
their research and development work. The scientific research work at
our universities looks very modest in comparison with operations of
this kind. Young men of the highest academic training and splendid
talents are busy day and night exploring the hidden treasures on the
boundary-lines between the various sciences and the science and art of
telephony, and their discoveries, I am sure, are the best investment
of this great industrial organization. For instance, their development
of the many details in my invention have been wonderful, and give
testimony of the highest kind to the excellence of their scientific
research. It is not so much the occasional inventor who nurses a great
art like telephony and makes it grow beyond all our expectations, as
it is the intelligence of a well-organized and liberally supported
research laboratory. When I think of that I am perfectly convinced that
very few of the great advances in the telephone art would have happened
under government ownership. That explains why telephony is practically
dead in most European countries. What little life it has in Europe is
due to the American research in the above-mentioned laboratories.
The General Electric Company, The Westinghouse Company, the Eastman
Kodak Company, and many other industrial corporations in this country
are supporting similar research and development laboratories, where
scientific men of the highest training are busily exploring what
Helmholtz called the rich territories near the boundary-lines of the
various sciences and of the science forming the foundation of their
respective industries. This reminds me of what I saw on a much smaller
scale in Germany, nearly forty years ago, when I was a student there.
We copied Germany’s good example, but are leading now, and the pace is
so swift that Europeans are dropping behind us very rapidly. The spirit
of scientific research has moved into our universities, and from the
universities it has moved into our industrial organizations. Industrial
research is making bigger and bigger demands upon the universities for
highly trained scientific research men; the demand is larger than the
supply, and because the industries can pay much higher salaries than
the universities can much difficulty has been experienced in inducing
bright and promising young scientists to pursue the academic career of
a teacher. The quality of the scientific teacher in the university is
temporarily deteriorating, that of the industrial research scientist is
steadily rising; on the whole, however, the country is a gainer. The
university man in the industries will transplant there the scientific
idealism of the university. The captains of our leading industries
already admit, as will be pointed out below, that the cultivation of
scientific idealism is the best policy for our American industries.
Listen to the papers which are read by their research men and you will
see that the industries actually practise the new gospel of scientific
idealism which they are preaching.
But I must not depart too far from the main thread of my story. When
it became known that the American Telephone and Telegraph Company had
acquired the rights to my _high inductance wave conductors_, all kinds
of legends were told about the invention and the fabulous price paid
for it. Newspapers love legends, because the public loves them. The
public is a child which loves to listen to fairy-tales. The only good
that this publicity did was to help me sell my inventions relating to
electrical tuning and rectification in wireless telegraphy. These lay
idle for quite a number of years, and waited for further developments
in the wireless art before they could be employed to advantage.
Electrical tuning and electrical rectification are fundamental
operations in the radio art to-day, but the wireless telegraphy of the
early days is a distant and poor relation of our present radio art. The
world had to wait quite some time for new discoveries which gave birth
to the epoch-making inventions of new men, like Lee De Forest and Major
E. H. Armstrong. It had to wait also for the great industrial research
laboratories before electrical tuning and rectification could come
into their own. In the early days of wireless telegraphy I suggested
several novel developments which might give a fair chance to tuning and
rectification, but I attracted scarcely any attention. The legends just
mentioned made people a little more attentive.
One morning a man stepped suddenly into my office at Columbia, and
introduced himself as Mr. Green, organizer and promoter of the Marconi
Company of America. He was full of action and looked like business.
“Are your wireless inventions for sale?” asked Mr. Green, without much
preliminary talk. “They are,” I answered, and I felt that my heart
was quivering on account of the unexpected blow which this laconic
question had given it. “How much?” asked Mr. Green. I gave him the
first figure that came into my head, and he, not a bit daunted, asked
whether I would take one-half in cash and one-half in stock. I asked
him twenty-four hours to decide. “All right,” said he, and promised to
call again the next day at the same hour. I should have been perfectly
satisfied to accept the cash offer and close the deal even without
the stock, but I was afraid that any over-anxiety on my part might
scare him away. The next day he called and the deal was closed, he
making a certain cash payment immediately and I agreeing to furnish
certain documents before the final payment was made. I was fairly well
acquainted with trading transactions in my native land; my father often
took me to market-places where he bought and sold cattle and horses.
I remember well the never-ending bartering which very often ended in
a fizzle. The nearer you get to Constantinople the worse becomes the
custom of this Oriental method of trading. Mr. Green had none of that
Orientalism, and his utter indifference to the figures involved in the
deal astonished me. He also took it for granted that I could and would
perform all the fine things which I promised to perform; that was very
flattering to me, but I was too much of an Oriental to accept, without
some apprehension, his apparently implicit trust in me.
This reminds me of an incident which happened eight years ago. The
Serbian Government cabled me to make a contract for five thousand tons
of lard; I was its only diplomatic and consular representative in
America during the war. I called up the representatives of Swift and
of Armour and told them over the telephone what was wanted, requesting
them to file their bids in forty-eight hours. Two days later I met
them in my office and some Serbian war commissioners happened to be
present. The contract was closed in less than thirty minutes, and when
I told the commissioners that it involved one million dollars they
crossed themselves in utter amazement. In Belgrade, they assured me,
the closing of such a contract would have required at least a month. I
astonished them as much as Mr. Green had astonished me, and the lard
transaction reminded me strongly of my deal with the Marconi Company of
America. Of course, lard handled by Swifts or Armours is a much simpler
proposition than a lot of belated inventions relating to electrical
tuning and electrical rectification for which there was not yet a
crying demand.
A few months after my deal with Green I was in Berlin, by invitation,
for the purpose of negotiating, for my telephone invention, a business
agreement with the famous electrical firm of Siemens and Halske. It
was founded by Werner von Siemens, whom I had met fifteen years before
through the kind introduction of my teacher, Excellenz von Helmholtz.
During the negotiations which lasted one month I met the directors
of this corporation in almost daily conferences, which lasted never
less than an hour and very often several hours. Every detail of my
invention was thoroughly discussed both from the purely scientific
and from the engineering side, in its relation to the earlier
publications which had a bearing upon it, in its legal aspects as
determined by the German patent laws; and finally the financial side
was carefully considered and definitely settled. There was no bartering
of any kind, neither was anything taken for granted. Contrary to our
American custom, the negotiations were directly between the inventor
and the scientific experts. The lawyers had very little to say, and
spoke only when the experts needed and asked for their opinion. When
I recall my negotiations with the American Telephone and Telegraph
Company, I remember nothing but lawyers. The negotiations with Siemens
and Halske recall scientific experts only; the negotiations with the
Marconi Company of America recall only Green. At the close of the
Berlin conferences and negotiations I was perfectly certain that I
had accomplished something; I understood my invention better than I
had ever understood it before, and I was perfectly certain that the
scientists of Siemens and Halske understood it just as well. Their
popular descriptions of it were better than anything I had ever done
myself. They also gave it a new name, and called telephone conductors
employing the invention “_pupinizierte linien_.” The French followed
suit, and called them “_les lignes pupinizé_.” These two new words
coined in my honor will last as long as the invention lasts, and so
far there is no sign that it will be superseded soon by some other
invention. Its simplicity and effectiveness give it much vitality.
After the completion of my negotiations in Berlin, the Siemens and
Halske engineers took me to Vienna for the purpose of introducing
me to the high officers in the Austrian Imperial Cabinet who guided
the destinies of the telephone system of the Austrian Empire. They
were glad, they said, to meet a native of Banat, a former subject of
Austria, who had made so important an invention, and they assured me
that their policy with regard to it would be guided entirely by the
decision of the Berlin experts. Vienna did not seem to have a mind of
its own, and all its thinking apparently was done for it by the experts
in Berlin. I was quite elated by the idea that the Berlin experts who
did the thinking for the Austrian Empire had been most happy to spend a
whole month with me in daily conferences, eager to learn all they could
from me. I could not help exclaiming: “Oh, what a fortunate thing it
was that in my early youth I ran away from this moribund Empire, and
landed in a country of opportunities, where every individual thinks
through his own head and carries his load on his own back.” Germany,
at that time, was so vigorous that she did not hesitate to do all the
thinking and hustling for Austria as well as for Turkey, and did not
realize that she was carrying around two corpses which could not be
revived by even the combined vitality of all the young and vigorous
nations, like the United States of America and United Germany.
Before returning to the United States I visited my sisters in Banat.
One of them was living in Idvor. On a Sunday in August during that
visit I was dining in her garden. There was a high fence around it,
and not far from it the boys and the girls of Idvor were dancing kolo
on the village green and the older people were looking on. Presently
somebody knocked on the garden-gate and my brother-in-law opened it.
There stood a rider, holding with one hand his horse, which was covered
with foam; in the other hand he held a telegram which he had brought
in haste from the telegraph station in another village, about five
miles away from Idvor. My native village had neither a telegraph nor a
telephone line, although I, its son, aspired to connect telephonically
every person in the United States to every other. The telegram in the
rider’s hand was for me, sent by my attorney, telling me that, on the
day before, my final papers had been delivered to the Marconi Company
and that the check for the final payments was in his hands. “Good
news,” I said to myself, and gave the rider a tip of ten florins to
reward him for his haste, evidenced by the white foam on his horse.
The bagpiper and the kolo-dancers stopped when they saw a ten-florin
note in the rider’s hand and heard him brag that he had delivered
to me a telegram from America. The wondering crowd assembled at the
garden-gate, and the older peasants who had gone to school with me in
my boyhood days asked me if the telegram really had come from America.
When I said yes, and that it had been sent on that very morning they
looked at each other and winked, as if signalling to each other to be
on guard lest I fool them with an American yarn. Then the oldest one
among them addressed me as follows: “Did you not tell us that between
here and America there are four empires, each bigger than Austria, and
then the great ocean, which one cannot cross in less than a week even
in the fastest of ships?” “I certainly did say that, and I repeat it
now,” said I. He added: “How can a telegram cross all that distance
in less than a day?” “It could do it in less than a minute if man’s
clumsiness did not delay it. It could travel from here to Vienna in
less than a second,” said I, and carefully watched his expression.
The old man seemed undecided; he did not know whether to take offense
at my attempt to work off a silly yarn on him, or to proceed with his
cross-examination, and finally decided in favor of the latter course.
“Who invented all that?” asked he impatiently. “An American did it,”
said I boastfully. “These Americans must be very clever people,” said
he and waited eagerly for my reply. “Yes, indeed, they are very clever
people,” said I. “Much more clever than anybody in this village?” was
his next question, and when I assured him that the Americans were much
more clever than anybody in Idvor, he fired at me the following shot:
“Then how in the name of St. Michael do you manage to make a living
there?”
This incident in my native Idvor did me a lot of good. The experts
in Berlin and the high officers in Vienna had been most polite and
complimentary, and all their well-meant adulation coming on the top of
the newspaper legends about my inventions might have turned my head and
made me imagine that I was a “wizard.” Many an inventor and scientist
has been ruined by being persuaded that he is a “wizard.” I have always
believed that when a successful inventor is exposed to dangers of that
kind he should, somewhat like that king of antiquity, hire somebody
to whisper as often as possible into his ear: “You are an ordinary
mortal.” Whenever I see now the Elliot Cresson Gold Medal of the
Franklin Institute, the gold medal of the National Institute of Social
Sciences, the Edison Medal of the American Institute of Electrical
Engineers, the Hebert prize of the French Academy, and several other
evidences of recognition in my possession, I always think of that
professor who blamed his hard luck for his failure to infer from the
loaded strings which hung daily over his head what I had inferred from
La Grange’s imaginary string. It was, I know, a lucky day when on the
14th of July, 1884, I found that second-hand bookshop in the Quartier
Latin in Paris and picked up there a copy of La Grange’s treatise.
Without it, I might have remained as ignorant of the remarkable
properties of a loaded string as that professor was. My answer to the
peasant’s question, “How in the name of St. Michael do you manage to
make a living there?” is this: “The humble herdsman of Idvor and the
famous La Grange of Paris told me how to do it.”
XII
THE NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL
The mathematical problems in the theory of electrical transmission, and
the research of the behavior of materials employed in the construction
of inductance-coils kept me busy, and made me forget that I was missing
the splendid opportunities offered by New Physics, which I always
represented symbolically by the picture of a vacuum-tube, because its
origin dates from Roentgen’s discovery. My complete recovery from the
shock of 1896 did not reconcile me to the vacuum-tube, until several
years had wiped out the memory which my mind had associated with it. By
that time I had dropped too far behind the men who were leading in the
procession of the revelations which New Physics had disclosed to man.
No sooner had Perrin, a French physicist, demonstrated that the cathode
rays were negative electricity moving from the negative electrode of
a vacuum-tube to the positive electrode than Professor John Joseph
Thomson, of the University of Cambridge, proved that this negative
electricity is concentrated in small corpuscles, called electrons
to-day, which move with great velocities, and that the ratio of the
electrical charge to the mass of each electron is experimentally
determinable, and is, under ordinary conditions, a definite and
invariable quantity. This learned man, when a youth of only
twenty-five, had predicted in 1881, fourteen years before Roentgen’s
discovery, that the cathode rays were small negatively charged bodies,
moving with great velocities. Assuming them to be spherical, he
calculated, by the Faraday-Maxwell electromagnetic theory, the ratio
of their charge to their mass. He showed theoretically that their mass
consisted of two parts, one of which is the ordinary gravitational or
material mass, and the other a new mass which is proportional to the
electrical energy in the electron, and that this mass also depended
upon the velocity of the motion in a definite way. He devised and
employed an experimental method to determine this ratio. The most
remarkable feature of this interrelation between the electromagnetic
mass and the velocity of motion was the fact that when the velocity
approached the velocity of light the mass approached an infinitely
large value. But no such extremes of velocity of motion of the
electrons in a vacuum-tube were found at that time.
Becquerel, the French physicist, discovered, soon after Roentgen’s
discovery, that certain substances associated with the element uranium
emitted electrons, both negative and positive, without being in a
vacuum-tube and submitted to the action of a great electrical force.
Madame Curie isolated the most active of these substances and called it
_radium_. The action of electron emission discovered by Becquerel was
called radioactivity. Three distinct things, it was found, were emitted
by radium: negative electrons, the so-called beta rays, some of which
were moving with enormous velocities; positive electrons, the so-called
alpha rays, moving with smaller velocities; and, finally, an emission
which had the same physical properties as the X-rays. The beta rays,
some of which move with a velocity nearly equal to the velocity of
light, enabled the physicists to determine experimentally, employing J.
J. Thomson’s method, the relation between the mass of the electron and
its velocity, and lo and behold, it was found that, in all probability,
the negative electron contained no other mass except the mass due
to its electromagnetic energy. In other words, a negative electron
is concentrated electricity and nothing else. Similar experiments
with positive electrons led to similar conclusions. Another most
remarkable result was the revelation of the great difference between
the masses, and, therefore, between the electrical energies residing
in the negative and in the positive electron. The mass of a positive
electron was found to be very nearly equal to the mass of a hydrogen
atom, and the mass of a negative electron was found to be only about
one two-thousandth part of the mass of the positive electron, and this
meant that if the electrons are of spherical shape then the diameter of
the positive electron is only one two-thousandth part of the diameter
of the negative electron, since the energies and therefore the masses
are inversely proportional to the diameters. In other words, there is
in the positive electron a much bigger concentration of electricity
than in the negative and, therefore, much more work was used up to
produce that concentration. Experimental data and calculation gave
for the diameter of a negative electron one ten-thousandth part of
the diameter of the smallest atom, that is, of the hydrogen atom,
and therefore the diameter of the positive electron should be only
one twenty-millionth part of the diameter of a hydrogen atom. A most
bewildering revelation!
The remarkable results of these historic experiments forced, one may
say, upon the physicist the electromagnetic theory of matter, the
theory, namely, that the ultimate components in the structure of
matter are positive and negative electrons. This theory was vaguely
foreshadowed by Faraday in his poetic visions suggested by his
researches on electrolysis. Needless to say, the physicists in the
United States were thrilled by these revelations, and by the new views
disclosed by them, perhaps even more than by the discoveries of the
X-rays and of radioactivity. The first visible effect of this thrill
was the organization in 1899 of the American Physical Society, a
quarter of a century after Tyndall’s visit to this country. Just think
of it, the great United States had no physical society prior to that
time!
It is an interesting fact that two of the most important American
organizations in abstract science were started at Columbia College.
The first was the American Mathematical Society. In 1888, two
young instructors at Columbia College, Fiske and Jacoby, started a
mathematical club. To-day the first is a professor of mathematics, and
the second is a professor of astronomy at Columbia University. I joined
them in 1889, as soon as I had returned to Columbia. We transformed the
mathematical club into the New York Mathematical Society, and elected
for president the famous Columbia don, the late Howard Van Amringe,
for many years senior professor of mathematics at Columbia College.
Doctor Fiske was its secretary; no young and struggling scientific
organization ever had a better secretary. The society prospered, and
in 1894 it was transformed into the American Mathematical Society,
counting among its members most of the distinguished mathematicians
of the land. I am certainly very proud that I am one of its charter
members.