Michael Pupin

“ 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. ”

“ The Physical-Technical Institute will always stand as a memorial to the man who preached in Germany the doctrine of the closest co-operation between abstract science and the industries. Germany adopted it first; the United States adopted it many years later. Helmholtz and Siemens always represented to me the highest symbol of this co-operation.
Bismarck and Moltke, Helmholtz and Siemens, were the great power which the young German eagle had discovered in his pinions; and he flew as he had never flown before, and his flight astonished me when I was a student in Berlin. ”

“ Just watch on some summer morning how the early rays of the sun arouse the slumbering rose from its blissful dreams, and remember that the rose responds because its body and soul are tuned to the melodies which the glorious sunlight is pouring into its enchanted ear. Remember also that what I have just described is not merely a flowery figure of speech, but that it is a concise description of a beautiful physical relationship, which science has discovered in the life of the rose. ”

“ This was as far as I remember now the mode of reasoning which she would address to me: “My boy, if you wish to go out into the world about which you hear so much at the neighborhood gatherings, you must provide yourself with another pair of eyes; the eyes of reading and writing. There is so much wonderful knowledge and learning in the world which you cannot get unless you can read and write. Knowledge is the golden ladder over which we climb to heaven; knowledge is the light which illuminates our path through this life and leads to a future life of everlasting glory.” ”

“ Among the great promoters of scientific progress ... how large is the number who may, in strict propriety, be said to have educated themselves? Take, for illustration, such familiar names as those of William Herschel, and Franklin, and Rumford, and Rittenhouse, and Davy, and Faraday, and Henry. Is it not evident that nature herself, to those who will follow her teachings, is a better guide to the study of her own phenomena than all the training of our schools? And is not this because nature invariably begins with the training of the observing faculties? ”

“ One day I referred to her as the Minnehaha of Cortlandt Street. “Minnehaha, laughing water,” exclaimed Bilharz:87 “where did you ever get that, you boiler-room bug?” and he laughed as if he had never heard a funnier thing in his life. “From Jim, the boiler-room hermit, to Longfellow, one of the greatest of American poets, is a tremendous jump, a salto mortale, as they call it in a circus,” said Bilharz; and then, growing more serious and thoughtful, he added something like this: “It is really wonderful what the eyes of a woman can do! ”

“ The modern nations should not remain indifferent to the memory of the “saints of science,” whose discoveries have advanced so much the physical and the spiritual welfare of man. My life among the saints of Cambridge suggested this idea, and my students, past and present, know that I have always been loyal to it, because I always believed that in this manner every American college and university could raise an invisible “temple consecrated to the eternal truth” and fill it with “icons of the great saints of science.” ”

“ Just explore the path which leads from one of these terminals to the other, and you will discover on each side of that path those beauties which continually thrill the heart of a scientific man. Do that and you will never again speak of the cold facts of science.
Let me for illustration pursue one of these paths for a little distance. Fifty years ago, when as a member of a herdsman’s squad of boys I watched the stars on the black background of a summer midnight sky, I felt that their fight was a language proclaiming the glory of God.
Has science changed that vision of the early childhood days? ”

“ Yes, the blossom and the fruit are so far as the untutored mind can see the beginning and the end of the short chain of apparently commonplace events which make up the annually returning life activity of the humble fruit-tree. Who cares what happens between so beautiful a beginning and so satisfactory an end? The scientist cares; his trained eye detects here an enchanting tale. Every one of those fruit-trees on the golden May day appears to him like a bride arrayed in the gayest of wedding raiment, waiting for the approaching bridegroom. ”

“ A physical fact denotes activity, otherwise it could not penetrate the depths of our consciousness. Activity is life, in the broadest sense of this word. Death is cold, but life is hot, and it is gross abuse of language to speak of cold facts of science. It is such language that creates prejudice against science, representing its methods as well as its results as devoid of everything which fires the emotional side of man. Every physical fact has two terminals; one is in our consciousness, and the other is in some star which is rejoicing in the blazing vigor of its youth. ”

“ Between my young Scotch friend, my mother, Nikola, and my professors in the Physical Institute, I soon forgot the unpleasant memories of the Teutonism in Prague,255 and Berlin no longer looked to me like a Thraenenthal, a valley of tears, as my old friend Bilharz in Cortlandt Street would have called it. I soon found myself enjoying warm personal friendships of German fellow students and of the professors, and it was a very fortunate thing; it was providential. Nothing but the love of God and the friendship of man can give that spiritual power which one needs in moments of great sorrow. ”

“ The same sunlight,” she continued, “awakens the fields, the meadows, and the pasturelands, and bids them raise the daily bread of man and beast; it also ripens the honey-hearted fruit in orchards and vineyards. If that is all done by the same heavenly force which hurls the lightning across the sombre summer clouds pregnant with showers, and also carries, as you say, the humble human voice over the wires between distant peoples, then I see in it a new proof of God’s infinite wisdom which uses one means only to do great things as well as small. ”

“ To spend one’s time day after day in dark cellars and basements and pass the night in a cheerless hall-room in Norfolk Street, surrounded by neighbors who were mostly foreign-born of the most unattractive type, was too much for a Serbian youth who knew the beautiful world as one sees it from the pasture-lands of his native village and from the banks of golden Delaware. ”

“ In other lands it is the springtime when the young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love; in the Serb Voyvodina it is the autumn season which has that mysterious power. It is in the autumn when marriage-bells never cease ringing, and the bagpipes with the merry songs of wedding-feasts stir up the hearts from one end of the Banat plains to the other. But my mother diverted my attention to more serious thoughts, and she assured me that she was even more happy preparing me for my journey to Cambridge than she was when, eleven years before, she was preparing me for my journey to Prague. ”

“ The reverence for scientific achievement, the revelation of the high honors which are in store for those who seek for truth in science—the inevitable comparison between a life devoted to the great pure search, on the one hand, and a life devoted to place-hunting or self-grasping on the other—all these shall come to the minds of thoughtful men in lonely garrets of our cities, in remote cabins of our prairies, and thereby shall come strength and hope for higher endeavor. ”

“ It will always invite the visitor to the nation’s capital to its peaceful precincts, whence one can get the impressive view of the beautiful monument to great Lincoln and of the Arlington heights on the distant bank of the Potomac River. When Lincoln and those buried on these sacred heights died, the National Academy of Sciences was born. The lives of these dead heroes of sixty years ago, as well as the life of the institution born then and living to-day, will always remind us that national defense is a stern reality and the most sacred of our patriotic duties. ”

“ But when the struggle was over, after the victory had been won, the leader of the new nation, immortal Washington, assumed the supreme executive office of the land and retired from it after two terms of service with a spirit of dignity and of humility which has no equal in human history. His Farewell Address to the American people, advocating the practice of idealism by the cultivation of religion, morality, patriotism, good faith, and justice toward all nations, is an echo of the voice of idealism which was the driving power of the American Revolution. ”

“ They must be, therefore, in the pockets of the American public. The invention made it possible to give the telephone service, which is now being given, at a lower rate than would have been possible if one hundred million dollars more had been spent. Every good invention benefits the public immeasurably more than it benefits the inventor or the corporation which exploits the invention. I certainly consider myself a public benefactor, and the National Institute of Social Sciences called me so when it gave me a gold medal almost as big as the full moon. ”

“ The telegraph and the telephone, the dynamo and the motor, the light of the electrical arc and of the incandescent filament, had lost much of their awe-inspiring character even at the time when I was a student at Cambridge. Inventions grow old and are superseded by other inventions, and, being the creation of the constructive schemes of mortal man, are themselves mortal. But the laws which the stars and the planets obey and have always obeyed in their paths through the heavens are unchangeable; they never grow old, and therefore they are immortal ”

“ When I compare the American Physical Society of twenty years ago with the American Physical Society of to-day I can scarcely believe that so much progress has been possible in so short a time. I recognize, however, that this remarkable growth is clue not only to the energy of youth of this country but also to the energy of youth of New Physics, which I call Electron Physics. ”

“ What a splendid thing it is to hear a lawyer express an opinion which is in perfect harmony with the opinion of every scientific man in the United States! It has been this mental attitude on the part of the American philanthropists and public-spirited captains of industry like Carnegie, Rockefeller, Swasey, Eastman, and others which has helped us to accomplish wonders in scientific advancement during the last twenty-five years. It has been men of this type who have built research laboratories in the American universities and endowed them generously. ”

“ Routh’s elaborate system of clever tripos problems in dynamics appeared to me for the first time as little parts, only, of a complex and endless art which had grown out of a simple and beautiful science, the science of dynamics, which first saw the light of day at Trinity College, Cambridge. The exquisite art as practised by Routh and the subtle science as described by Maxwell, the two leading Cambridge wranglers of 1854, disclosed to me the real meaning of Newton, the greatest among the great Cambridge men, the creator of the science of dynamics. ”

“ Legends began to grow up among the Adelphi boys and girls about a Serbian youngster who had won the ten-mile race without previous training. When your young and enthusiastic friends begin to indulge in legends about you, be assured that you are getting on some. But legends, like nursery rhymes, will lull you to sleep if you are not very, very wide-awake. This experience made me see clearly what young Lukanitch had meant when he told me what oarsmanship might do for me at Columbia even if I did not know much Greek and Latin. ”

“ Webster’s idealism was in the hearts of men of his generation, who, under the great leadership of Lincoln, one of the greatest among American idealists, conducted the Civil War and preserved the American Union. Lincoln’s immortal words: “With malice toward none, with charity for all,” will forever remind the world of the idealism which was in the hearts of the American people who fought for the preservation of the American Union. President Wilson is one of the best biographers of George Washington, and he also published a splendid study of the constitutional government of the United States. ”

“ Men of Andrew White’s clearness of vision will certainly tell you not only that the disciplined army of American scientists mobilized under the flag of the National Research Council will not interfere with the spiritual development of our national life, but that, on the contrary, nothing else will advance that spiritual development so rapidly and so irresistibly. The intellectual and spiritual discipline which, according to White, our nation needs, is certainly one of the ideals of these men of science. ”