AN EARLY VIEW OF COOPER UNION
The great opportunities which, according to my good friends on the Delaware farm, awaited me in this country were certainly not in the direction of arts requiring great manual dexterity. The country of baseball offered, I thought, very few opportunities in this direction to a foreign-born boy. I was convinced of that every time I made a comparison between myself and the other boys who were doing the same manual work in the factory that I did. They were my superiors. In one thing, however, I thought I was their superior. They did not know much about the latest things described in the Scientific American, nor in the scientific supplements of the Sunday Sun, which I read assiduously with the aid of a pocket dictionary. The educational opportunities in the factory also escaped them. Jim, the boiler-room engineer and fireman of the factory, became interested in my scientific reading and encouraged me by paying several compliments to my interest in these things. He once suggested that some day, perhaps, I might become his scientific assistant in the boiler-room, if I did not mind shovelling coal and attending to the busy fires. He was joking, but I took him seriously. Every morning before the factory started I was with Jim, who was getting the steam up and preparing to blow the whistle and start the wheels going. I volunteered to assist him “shovelling coal and attending to the busy fires,” and after a time I understood the manipulations in the boiler-room quite well, according to Jim. The steam-engine excited my liveliest interest. It was the first opportunity that I had ever had to study at close range the operations of a steam-engine, and I made the most of it, thanks to Jim’s patient interest in my thirst for new information. He was my first professor in engineering.
One exceptionally hot afternoon during that summer found Jim prostrated by heat and I volunteered to run the boiler-room until he got well. I did it during the rest of that afternoon, much to the surprise of everybody, but was not allowed to continue, because a fireman’s license was required for that. When Jim returned I urged him to help me get a license, but he answered that an intelligent boy, eager to learn, should not cross the Atlantic for the purpose of becoming a fireman. “You must aim higher, my lad,” said Jim, and he added that if I continued to make good use of my pocket dictionary and of my scientific reading I should soon outgrow the opportunities offered by the New England Cracker Factory in Cortlandt Street. He never missed a chance to encourage me and to promise new successes for new efforts. In that respect he reminded me much of my mother.
Jim was a humble fireman and boiler-room engineer; his early education was scanty, so that he was not much on books; but he stood in awe in the presence of books. Referring to my habit of carrying a pocket dictionary in my hip pocket and looking up in it the meaning and the pronunciation of every word which was new to me, he would exclaim, jokingly, “Look in the book,” whenever some obscure points arose in our boiler-room discussions. His admiration for books was much increased when I related to him the story of James Watt and his experiments with the steam-engine, a story which I had dug out in an old encyclopædia in the Cooper Union Library. When I told him that James Watt had perfected his steam-engine and thus started the development of the modern steam-engine several years before the Declaration of Independence, he dropped a remark which I never forgot. He said: “The English made us write the Declaration of Independence, and they also gave us the steam-engine with which we made our independence good.” Jim was not much on learning but he was brimful of native practical philosophy.
Jim had a relative attending classes at Cooper Union and encouraged me to join several of its evening classes, which I did. I reported to him regularly the new things which I learned there. This practice benefited me even more than it did Jim, because in trying to explain to him the laws of heat phenomena, which were explained to me in the evening lectures at Cooper Union, I got a very much better hold of them. The first ideas of sound and light I caught on the pasture-lands of my native village; the first ideas of the phenomena of heat I caught in the boiler-room in Cortlandt Street and at Cooper Union lectures. These lectures, supplemented by Jim’s boiler-room demonstrations, proved much more effective than the instruction which I had received from my teacher Kos, in Panchevo. Kos was a Slovene, a native of that beautiful valley in Carniola, in the very bosom of the Dolomites; it is nearer to being an ideal dreamland than any other spot in Europe. To Kos, as to every true Slav, and particularly to the Slovenes of Carniola, the poetical side of physical phenomena appealed most strongly. Hence his patient listening to my enthusiastic professions of the belief that sound and light were different forms of the language of God. But as I watched the busy flames under Jim’s boilers, and understood how they were sustaining the strenuous efforts of steam to supply every hustling wheel in the factory with driving power, I understood for the first time that there is also a prose in physics not a bit less impressive than its poetry. It is this prose which interested Jim, the fireman, just as it did the Cooper Union lecturer. Their chief concern was what heat can do and not what it is. My Slavonic craving for knowing what heat is was soon satisfied by reading a poem in prose concerning the nature of heat. But of that later.
During my very first visits to the Cooper Union Library I saw a great painting hung up in the northwest corner of its large reading-room. It was called “Men of Progress,” and represented a group of very learned-looking men. I admired the painting, but took no pains to find out its meaning. One day, while reading in the Cooper Union Library, I saw quite near me an old gentleman standing and carefully scrutinizing what was going on. I imagined, at first, that he had stepped out of that painting. I looked again and found that the figure in the painting which I fancied had walked out was still there and that the old gentleman near me was undoubtedly the original from which the artist had painted that figure. The ambidextrous youth behind the library-desk told me afterward that the old gentleman was Peter Cooper, the founder of Cooper Union, and that he was one of the group of famous men represented in the great painting. He looked as I imagined the Patriarch of Karlovci must have looked. He was a striking resemblance to St. Sava, the Educator, as he is represented on an ikon in our church in Idvor. The same snowy locks and rosy complexion of saintly purity, and the same benevolent look from two luminous blue eyes. Peter Cooper was then eighty-five years of age, but he looked as lively as if he were going to live another eighty-five years. His personality as revealed by his appearance inspired me with awe, and I read everything I could lay my hands on concerning his life; then I read about the lives of the other great men who were associated with Peter Cooper in that historical painting. Some of these men were: Morse, the first promoter of the electric telegraph; Joseph Henry, the great physicist, head of the Smithsonian Institution, and founder of scientific bureaus in Washington; McCormick, the inventor of the reaper; Howe, the inventor of the sewing-machine; Ericsson, the engineer of the Monitor, and so forth. My study of their lives was a timely preparation for my visit to Philadelphia, to see the Centennial Exposition, the preparatory work for which I had seen two years prior to that time, when, returning from the Delaware farm, I stopped at Philadelphia to search for opportunities.
From an engraving by John Sartain after a painting by J. Schussele, reproduced by the courtesy of Cooper Union
Dr. Morton Colt Saxton
Bogardus
McCormick
Peter Cooper Professor Henry Ericsson
Goodyear Dr. Mott
Mott Sickles