From Immigrant to Inventor

by Michael Pupin

There was one girl among the thirty biscuit-packers who, in my opinion, never made a mistake in packing. I never took pains to inspect her work, and why should I when I was sure of her perfection? But I watched her and feasted my eyes upon her whenever I had spare time and was sure that nobody was observing me. She became conscious of it and every now and then she would suddenly look up and catch my admiring but cautious gaze. A bashful blush would give me away in spite of my efforts to hide my thoughts and feelings. She guessed them and she smiled as if greatly pleased and much amused, but she cleverly avoided giving me an opportunity to make a confession. I might have done it in spite of my extreme bashfulness. My note-books were full of her pictures, which I drew and signed under them her name, Jane Macnamara. Perhaps Jim had seen these pictures among my many sketches of the boiler-room and its contents, and hence his warning to me.

One Monday morning Jane did not appear at her usual place in the packing-room; her friend, another packing girl, told me that Jane had been married on the previous Saturday. I tried my best to appear as if I received the news with indifference, but failed. The girls observed a change; I neither smiled nor did I frown, but I thought a lot, and the girls seemed to take quite an interest in my thoughtfulness, but studiously avoided annoying me. Only now and then one of the girls would whisper to me: “Penny for your thoughts, Michael.” Jim, I was sure, also observed the change, but said nothing, as if he had observed nothing. One day he introduced me to an acquaintance of his whom he called Fred, who looked like a middle-aged man. He had wonderful deep furrows in his face, and his hands were large and very bony and looked as if the daily toil had rubbed off all the superfluous flesh and fat from them. Jim told me that Fred was far from middle age, but barely over thirty, and that some twelve years before he had plans and ambitions just as big as mine, backed by at least as much brains as he thought I had. Fred’s friends expected big things from him, said Jim, but suddenly Fred lost his heart and married and raised a big family of children somewhere in Jersey City. “To-day,” said Jim, “Fred is mentally just where he was twelve years ago, and if he did not have the contract of making the wooden packing-boxes for this factory he would look even older than he is looking now,” and then he added, in his usual offhand manner by way of illustration, that corn-stalks cease to grow as soon as the ears of corn appear and all the sap of the corn-stalk is served to the ears. Referring to Fred’s numerous children, Jim finished his picture by saying that Fred looked like a withering corn-stalk with many small ears of corn on it, and that he hoped that the withering corn-stalk would hold out until the numerous ears of corn had ripened. He admitted, however, that he himself was a withering corn-stalk with no ears of corn at all; that his life was the other extreme from Fred’s, and that neither he nor Fred had in their younger days studied and applied in practice the controlling regulators of life. Jim’s sermons on self-control always hit the mark; and when, referring to his advice to me to control my temper, my heart, and my speech, I suggested that according to him life was a series of all kinds of controls difficult to manage, he answered that nothing is difficult when it becomes a habit. “Just examine my boiler-room,” he said, “and you will find that everything is controlled. The centrifugal governor controls the speed of the engine; the safety-valve limits the pressure of steam; every fire has a regulator of its air draft, and every oven has a temperature indicator. I know them all and I watch their operations without knowing that I am doing it. Practice makes perfect, my lad, and perfection knows no difficulties even in a boiler-room as full of all kinds of tricks as human life is.” Jim’s sermons were always short and far ahead of anything I had ever heard in the churches in Delaware City, or in Dayton, New Jersey, or in the Bowery Mission, or in any other church which up to that time I had visited in this country; and, moreover, they were not accompanied by congregational singing, which bored me. I understood why so many blacksmiths and other people of small learning made a great success as preachers in this country, whereas in my native village the priest, who prided himself upon his learning, was obliged to read those sermons only which were sent to him by the bishop of the diocese. I suggested to Jim in a jocular way to quit the boiler-room and become a preacher, and he answered that the boys and girls of the New England Cracker Factory in Cortlandt Street furnished a sufficiently large field for his religious and educational mission. Jim’s assistance helped me much to let the dream about Jane fade away gradually and make room in my imagination for the dreams which I first saw at Princeton under that elm-tree in front of Nassau Hall.

The factory in Cortlandt Street was in many respects a college in which Jim was the chaplain; and it had a professor who should be mentioned here. It also had a dormitory; several of the young fellows employed in the factory lived on the top floor of the building. I was one of them, and I did not change my quarters when I was advanced to the position of assistant to the shipping clerk. Two great attractions kept me there. One was that the other fellows were out every evening visiting theatres and music-halls, so that I had the whole loft, and, in fact, the whole factory all to myself and to a chum of mine, who was much older than I in years but not in his position in the factory. His name was Bilharz, and he was the second attraction. He was the opposite to Jim and to every human being I had ever met. He knew nothing of nor did he care for the concrete or practical things of life, but always lived in dreams about things which happened centuries ago. He knew Latin and Greek and all kinds of literatures, but never made any attempts to make any use of his knowledge. Factory work of the humblest kind was good enough for him, and I believed that he would have been satisfied to work for his board only, if pay had been refused him. He informed me once by an accidental slip of the tongue that he had studied theology at the University of Freiburg, in southern Germany, and would have become a priest if an unfortunate love-affair had not put an end to his ecclesiastical aspirations. He had no other aims when he came to America, he said, than to work for a modest living and to lead a life of profound obscurity, until the Lord called him away from this valley of tears, as he expressed it. He used a German expression and called the earth a “Thraenenthal.” Although a German he spoke English well, being a finished scholar and having lived in America for a number of years, and having a memory for sound which impressed me as most remarkable. He sang like a nightingale, but only on evenings when we were all alone. Ecclesiastical music was his favorite, and during many an evening the strains of “Gloria in Excelsis Deo,” “Ave Maria,” and “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth” rang forth from the spacious lofts of the New England Cracker Factory and lost themselves in the silence of night among the deserted buildings of Cortlandt Street, which were alive in daytime only. I never tired listening to his recitations of Latin and Greek poetry, although I did not understand it, and of selected passages from Shakespeare and Goethe, which I did understand. He loved the art of articulate speech and of melody, and he thought of things only that happened three thousand years ago when Homer sang and the Olympian gods guided the destinies of men, but he cared for nothing else. The steam-engine and every other kind of mechanism were to him a deadly prose which, in his opinion, Satan had invented for the purpose of leading astray the spirit of man. “They are the weapons by which people like you are keeping in slavery people like me,” he said once, jokingly, referring to my interest in the boiler-room operations and to my admiration of the great captains of industry whose lives I studied and whose work I had seen and admired at the Philadelphia exposition. I sometimes suspected that he felt alarmed by what he considered my worship of false gods, and that this impelled him to do everything he could for my redemption from heathenism. My admiration for his learning was great, but my sympathy for his misfortunes was even greater. His hands were once caught in a machine and most of his fingers had become stiff and crooked so that they looked like the talons of a falcon. His sharp features, a crooked nose and protruding eyes, supported this suggestion of a falcon, but his awkward, flat-footed walk suggested a falcon with broken wings; to say nothing of his other misfortunes which made him in spirit also a falcon with broken wings.

I felt that he knew a great deal more about the Jane incident than he cared to disclose to me. One day I referred to her as the Minnehaha of Cortlandt Street. “Minnehaha, laughing water,” exclaimed Bilharz: “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! They are just like the stars in the heavens, encouraging us poor mortals to aim at celestial heights. But many a sky-rocket seemed to be sailing for the stars and suddenly it found itself buried in mud. I am one of these sky-rockets,” said Bilharz; “you are not, thanks to the timely intervention of a kindly divinity.” He meant Jim. Then, continuing in his usual dramatic manner, he recited in Latin an ode of Horace, in which the poet speaks of a youth trusting to the beaming countenance of his lady-love as a mariner trusting to the sunlit ripples of a calm sea who is suddenly upset by a treacherous squall and, being rescued, gratefully offers his wet garments in sacrifice to Neptune, the god of the sea. After translating the ode and explaining its meaning to me he urged me to hang my best clothes in the boiler-room as a sacrifice to Jim, the divinity which had rescued me from the treacherous waves of “Minnehaha, laughing water.” “You are the luckiest of mortals, my boy,” said Bilharz to me; “some day you will provoke the envy of the gods and then look out for stern Nemesis!” I did not understand the full meaning of these classical allusions, but he assured me that some day I should. I told Bilharz that my luck, of which he spoke so often, was mostly due to my being so near to a man of his learning, and that I thought he ought to be a professor in Nassau Hall at Princeton. He declined the honor, but offered to prepare me for it, and I accepted.

Bilharz was very moody and for days and days he had nothing to say to anybody, not even to me! Nobody else cared, because nobody understood him, but I did care. When he discovered that I sincerely admired his learning and was interested in his puzzling personality he became more communicative, sometimes almost human. His English accent was excellent, and I asked his opinion about my accent and he assured me with childlike frankness that it was rotten, but that it could be fixed up if I submitted to a course of training prescribed for me by my Vila on the Delaware farm. “I could not be your Vila, deformed as I am,” said he, referring to his crippled fingers and to his awkward walk, “but I will gladly be your satyr and teach you how to imitate not only the sounds of human language but also, if you wish it, the melodies of birds and the chirping of bugs. The satyrs are great in that.” I knew that he could, because many an evening while I was on the dormitory loft of the factory reading the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, Patrick Henry’s and Daniel Webster’s speeches, and Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg, Bilharz, in another part of the building, would be imitating sounds of all kinds of birds and bugs, after he had grown tired reciting Greek and Latin poetry and singing ecclesiastical songs. That was his only amusement, and he enjoyed it when he was sure that nobody was listening; he made an exception in my case. We finally made the start in what he called my preparation for Nassau Hall. In the course of less than a month I finished reciting to Bilharz the Declaration of Independence, the American Constitution, and Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg, submitting to many corrections and making many efforts to give each word its proper pronunciation, and finally he accepted my performance as satisfactory. By that time I knew these documents by heart and so did Bilharz, and he, in spite of himself, liked them so well that he accused me of conspiring to make an American out of him. “You are sinking rapidly, my boy, in the whirlpool of American democracy, and you are dragging me down with you,” said Bilharz one evening, when I objected to some of the amendments which he offered in order to harmonize the American theory of freedom with the principles of German socialism. He admitted that he, a loyal Roman Catholic, did not care much for German social democracy, but that he often wondered why the American enthusiasts for democracy did not take German social democracy and save themselves the trouble of writing the Declaration of Independence. I called his attention to the fact that American democracy is much older than German social democracy, and he, somewhat irritated by that suggestion and by my defense of American democracy, as I understood it, suggested that he should resign his position as my teacher and become my pupil. His flippant criticism of American democracy and my stiff defense of it helped me much to see things which otherwise I should have missed, but these discussions threatened the entente cordiale between Bilharz and myself. Finally we compromised and changed our course of reading, dropping things relating to political theories and taking up poetry. Longfellow’s and Bryant’s poetry were my favorites. “The Village Blacksmith” and “Thanatopsis” I knew by heart and enjoyed reciting to Bilharz, who was greatly pleased whenever in these recitations I avoided making a single serious break in my pronunciation. After reading some of Shakespeare’s dramas which Booth and other famous actors like Lawrence Barrett and John McCullough were playing at that time, I visited the theatre often, and from my modest gallery seat I would analyze carefully the articulation of every syllable which Booth and the other actors were reciting. Booth did not have a big voice; it was much smaller than the voice of Lawrence Barrett or of powerful John McCullough, but I understood him better. Bilharz explained it by saying that Booth had a perfect articulation. “Articulation is an art which the Greeks invented; big voice is brute force common among the Russians,” he used to say, protesting whenever he had an opportunity against mere physical strength, which was natural considering his scanty physical resources. He hated both the Russians and the Prussians, because, in his opinion, they both were big brutes. In those days the southern Germans had no love for the Prussians. He never missed a single chance to sing the praises of Greek drama and of the Greek theatre and of everything which flourished during the classical age. He called my attention to the enormous size of Greek theatres and to the necessity of perfect articulation on the part of Greek actors if they were to be heard. “They were great artists,” said he; “our actors are duffers only. We are all duffers! Give me the Greeks, give me Homer, Pindar, Demosthenes, Plato, Praxiteles, Phidias, Sophocles, and hundreds of others who spoke the language of the gods and did things which only the divine spirit in man can do, and you can have your Morse, McCormick, Howe, Ericsson, and the rest of the materialistic crew who ran the show at Philadelphia.” He certainly told many a fine story when he spoke of the great poets, orators, philosophers, and sculptors of Greece, and his stories impressed me much because they were great revelations to me; they were the first to arouse my interest in the great civilization of Greece. They would have impressed me even more if Bilharz had not displayed a glaring tendency to exaggerate, in order to create a strong contrast between what he called the idealism of classical Greece and what he called the realistic materialism of modern America. According to him the first had its seat among the gods on the ethereal top of Mount Olympus and the second one was sinking deeper and deeper through the shafts of coal and iron mines into the dark caverns of material earth. “No action,” said Bilharz, “which needs the assistance of a steam-engine or of any other mechanism can trace its origin to idealism nor can it end in idealism.” I suggested that every animal body is a mechanism and that its continuous evolution seems to indicate that the world is heading for a definite ideal. Bilharz flew up like a hornet when he heard the word evolution.

A lively discussion was going on in those days between the biological sciences and theology, Huxley and many other scientists championing the claims of Darwin’s evolution theory and the theologians defending the claims of revealed religion. I was too young and too untutored to understand much of those learned discussions, but Bilharz followed them with feverish anxiety. His theological arguments did not appeal to me, and so far as I was concerned they lost even the little force they had when Bilharz turned them against what he called American mechanism and materialism, which he tried to make responsible for the alleged materialism of the evolution theory. His political and philosophical theories based upon blind prejudice created a gap between him and me which widened every day. Here are some illustrations of it.

When I described to him the election day of 1876, telling him that I and thousands of others had stood quietly and patiently hours and hours in drenching rain in front of the New York Tribune building waiting for the returns which would tell us whether Hayes or Tilden was to be the supreme executive head of the United States during the coming four years; how the next day some of the newspapers had raised a howl of “fraud,” accusing the Republican party of tampering with the election returns in one of the States, but that the people of New York City and of the whole country had paid no attention, trusting implicitly to the machinery of government to straighten out crookedness if it existed, and how this dignity of American democracy thrilled me when I compared it with the rows and scandals accompanying elections in the countries of the military frontier of Austria-Hungary, he only laughed and ridiculed the whole procedure of electing by ignorant voters the supreme executive head of a nation. He told me a story of Aristides of Athens, who, being requested by a voter to write upon a shell the name of the man who was to be condemned for some crime which was not quite clear to the Athenian voter, wrote down his own name, and Aristides, the just, the noblest character of Athens, was condemned. But the condemnation of this just and noble and innocent man was, according to Bilharz, a condemnation of the Athenian democracy, whose shortcomings brought the downfall of Greek civilization, and he added that the shortcomings of American democracy would bring the downfall of the old European civilization. The Aristides story interested me much, but the inference he drew from it made me think of Christian of West Street, and of his blunt remark: “A European greenhorn must have told you that.” Jim was present at this discussion. He was a strong Presbyterian and ridiculed on every occasion what he called Bilharz’s Roman Catholic views. This time he quoted Lincoln by saying “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Then he added for the edification of Bilharz that religion in the Roman Catholic church is of the church, by the church, for the church, and that this was the real reason why Bilharz, trained in this kind of theology, would never understand American democracy. This shocked me, because I expected a fist fight between my two best friends, but ... the fist fight did not take place.

I enjoyed taking long walks on Broadway whenever I had free time, going up on one side and coming down on the other, inspecting every window in bookstores and art stores and looking at the latest things in pictorial art, at the titles of the latest things in literature, and at the photographs and engravings of prominent men of the day. This gave me quite an idea of what was going on in the American world of intellect. Bilharz never joined me because, he said, there was nothing worth seeing on these inspection tours of mine. Once during the noon recess I managed to take him around the corner of Cortlandt Street and Broadway trusting to luck to meet a certain great person whom I had seen several times before and recognized because I saw his photograph in the shop-windows of Broadway. I succeeded, for there in the midst of the Broadway crowd appeared before us William Cullen Bryant, the author of “Thanatopsis”! He was then the editor of The Evening Post, which was located on Broadway not far from Cortlandt Street. I pointed him out; Bilharz held his breath and, referring to the wonderful appearance of the great poet, he said: “There is the only man in this materialistic land of reapers and mowing-machines and chattering telephone disks who could take a seat among the gods on Mount Olympus and be welcomed there by the shades of the great idealists of Greece.”

At another time I managed to take him as far as City Hall; it was some holiday, and the papers had announced that President Hayes and his secretary of state, William Evarts, would be at City Hall at noon, and they were there. Bilharz and I stood in a huge crowd, but we had a good view of the President and of his secretary of state, and we heard every word of their short speeches. They were dressed just like everybody else, but their remarkable physiognomies and their scholarly words convinced me that they belonged to the exalted position into which the vote of the people had placed them. The New York Sun was a bitter opponent of President Hayes and published his picture on the editorial page of every one of its issues. In this picture the letters spelling “fraud” were represented as branded across the expansive brow of the President. But as I looked at him standing in front of City Hall and beheld the light which was reflected from his smooth and honest brow I knew that the New York Sun was wrong, and I vowed never to read it again until that picture disappeared from its editorial pages. Bilharz did not understand my admiration of the scene which we had witnessed: the democratic simplicity of the highest officials in the great United States and the very informal reception given to them in the great metropolis, New York, was all due, according to him, to a lack of artistic taste on the part of vulgar democracy. I thought of the multicolored uniforms loaded with shining decorations, of the plumed hats and long sabres, and of the numerous glaring flags with imperial eagles displayed on such occasions in the Austrian Empire, and I told Bilharz that if that monkey business was all due to a profusion of artistic taste, then give me the simplicity of vulgar democracy. Bilharz shrugged his shoulders and pitied me, and I pitied him for having to pass, as he assured me often, the rest of his days in this—to him—the most uninteresting part of the valley of tears, das Thraenenthal, as he called this terrestrial globe.

Such were the many differences of mental attitude which widened the gap between Bilharz and myself. He clung to the notions which were handed down to the Old World from generations long departed; I, following Jim’s suggestion, was trying to pick up wherever I could new ideas in the New World. Much learning hath made him mad, thought I, whenever I analyzed the strange ideas which Bilharz had of the United States of America. I came to the conclusion that his term of apprenticeship as greenhorn would never end. It is a national calamity that the vast majority of our immigrants never see the end of their apprenticeship as greenhorns.