I have nearly finished the story of my college career, and I am aware that it is silent on a subject which was always dear to my heart; that subject is science. A young lad who was stimulated so much by the lives of the men represented in the Cooper Union library painting, entitled “Men of Progress”; by the splendid scientific exhibits in Philadelphia in 1876; by Jim’s boiler-room demonstrations supplemented by Cooper Union lectures on heat; by Tyndall’s and Hunt’s poetic descriptions of scientific achievements; and above all by his own visions concerning physical phenomena on the pasture-lands of his native village—that lad goes through college, and the story of his college career is nearly closed without saying anything about his scientific studies at Columbia College! That certainly looks strange, and suggests the inference that after all Bilharz had finally succeeded in tearing me away completely from what he called the worship of scientific materialism. Bilharz did not succeed in that, but what he actually did is worth relating here.
After my departure from Cortlandt Street, Bilharz felt quite lonesome and tried to get companionship and consolation from a Tyrolean zither which he managed well in spite of his stiff fingers. Knowing my fondness for Homer’s heroic verse and for the lyric verse in the chorus of Greek dramas, he practised reciting them with zither accompaniment. He thus imitated most successfully a Serbian guslar’s recitations of old Serbian ballads, accompanied by the single-string instrument, called gusle. In recognition of the success of his clever scheme, which, I was sure, he had devised for my special benefit, I called him the Greek guslar. He who has seen huge multitudes of Serbs assembled around a blind guslar in the midst of some great festive gathering, listening by the hour in spellbound silence to his recitations, will understand how Bilharz managed to attract me to many a neighborhood gathering on the top loft of the Cortlandt Street factory. Every time I listened to the zither accompanying his chanting of familiar Greek verses I imagined that Baba Batikin’s spirit was transferred from the little peasant village of Idvor to the great metropolis of America! Whenever I told him that, he seemed to be immensely pleased, because the life of a blind guslar appealed to him much. 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. Bilharz disappeared from Cortlandt Street a short time before I graduated, and he left me his zither as a souvenir, and also an old edition of Homer’s Iliad by the famous German philologist Dindorf. I have not seen him since that time, but I shall never forget him. He was the first to call my attention to an old and magnificent civilization, the spiritual beauty of which appealed to my young imagination with increasing force as my knowledge of it increased. I often recall his almost fanatical dislike of mechanisms, and wonder what he would say to-day if he heard the pianola, the phonograph, and some of the distortions of radio broadcasting, to say nothing of the dramatic atrocities of the kinematograph!
On the other hand, the growth of my understanding from the first day of my landing at Castle Garden was due to my feeding upon the spiritual food offered to me daily by a civilization in which I was living, and which I wished to understand but did not understand. My preparation for college lifted here and there the mist which prevented my vision from seeing the clear outline of American civilization. Columbia College brought me into touch with the college life of American boys and with men of great learning and wonderful personalities, and they helped me to dispel every particle of that mist, and there in the clear sunshine of their learning I saw the whole image of what I believed to be American civilization: a beautiful daughter of a beautiful mother, which is the Anglo-Saxon civilization. The memory of this vision always recalled to my mind the ode of Horace which opens with the line:
“O matre pulchra filia pulchrior!”
The study and the contemplation of these two civilizations, the ancient civilization of Greece and the new civilization of the Anglo-Saxons, which appealed to me as the two greatest civilizations of human history, made every other study in my college curriculum appear insignificant, although I gained several prizes in the exact sciences, and although I never gave up the idea that my future work would be in the field of science.
But there is another and perhaps the most potent reason why science figures so little in the preceding part of the story of my college career. Instruction in the exact sciences in those days was most elementary, not only at Columbia College but also in most American colleges. For instance, laboratory work in physics and in chemistry was not a part of the Columbia College curriculum, and the lecture-room told me less about physics than I had known from my studies of Tyndall’s popular publications and from the Cooper Union instruction before I entered college. The question “What is Light?” I brought with me from the pasture-lands of my native village, and the professor of physics at Columbia College offered no answer to it except to refer to vibrations in an ether, the physical properties of which he admitted he could not satisfactorily describe. On this point he did not seem to be much wiser than my humble teacher Kos in Panchevo. My mentor, Rutherfurd, was always interested in this question, as in many other advanced questions in science, and he took much delight in discussing them with me. He was the first to inform me that the great question, “What is Light?” would probably be answered when we understood more clearly a new electrical theory advanced by a Scotch physicist, Maxwell by name, who was a pupil of the great Faraday.
One day toward the end of my senior year I told my mentor, Rutherfurd, of a lecture-room experiment performed by Rood, his friend, at that time professor of physics at Columbia College. This experiment was the first announcement to me that Faraday was one of the great discoverers in electrical science. The experiment was simplicity itself, and consisted of a loose coil of copper wire, held in the left hand of the lecturing professor, the terminals of the coil being connected to a galvanometer supported on the wall of the lecture-room, so that its needle could be seen by every student in the room. When Rood, like a magician manipulating a wand, moved with his right hand a small magnet toward the coil, the distant galvanometer needle, impelled by a force which up to that time was a mystery to me, swung violently in one direction, and when the magnet was moved away from the coil the galvanometer needle swung just as violently in the opposite direction. When one terminal, only, of the coil was connected to the galvanometer, and thus the electric circuit of the coil was broken, the motion of the magnet produced no effect. “This is Faraday’s discovery of Electromagnetic Induction.” said Rood with a deep sigh, and ended the lecture without any further comment, as if he wished to give me a chance to think it over before he added additional information. Rutherfurd knew Rood’s picturesque mannerism, and my description of the experiment amused him. He suggested that the good professor was very fond of mystifying his students. I certainly was much mystified and did not wait for the next lecture to clear the mystery, but spent all day and most of the night reading about Faraday’s wonderful discovery. It was made over fifty years before that time, but I had never known anything about it, although Edison’s dynamos in his New York Pearl Street station had been supplying for over a year thousands of customers with electric power for incandescent lighting. Columbia College was not one of these customers for a long time after my graduation. When I finished my description of the experiment, and assured Rutherfurd that it was the most thrilling physical phenomenon that I had ever seen, and that I had remained awake almost all night after seeing it, he looked pleased, and informed me that this very phenomenon was the basis of Maxwell’s new Electrical Theory.
That was the experiment which helped me to decide a very weighty question. Professor Rood had informed me that in recognition of my high standing in science as well as in letters I could choose either of two graduate fellowships, one in letters or one in science, each worth five hundred dollars a year. Either would have meant an additional three years of graduate study at Columbia. I was much tempted to turn to letters and continue my work with Merriam, the idol of all Columbia College students, including myself, who had felt the wonderful charm of his personality and of his profound and at the same time most picturesque classical scholarship. But the magic experiment which had told me the first story of Faraday’s great discoveries, and had aroused my dormant enthusiasm for physics, caused me to bid good-by to Merriam and turn to science, my first love. Nevertheless, I did not accept the fellowship in science and stay three years longer at Columbia; I preferred to take up the study of Faraday and of Maxwell in the United Kingdom, where these two great physicists were born and where they had made their great discoveries. Trustee Rutherfurd and his young nephew, my chum and classmate, John Armstrong Chanler, applauded my decision, and promised to assist me in my undertaking whenever assistance should be needed. Rutherfurd assured me that I should certainly succeed as well in my scientific studies in European universities as I had succeeded in my general cultural studies at Columbia College, if the revelations of the new world of physics, certainly in store for me, could arouse in me the same enthusiasm which had been aroused by the revelations of that new spirit and that new current of thought which had given birth to the American civilization. That this enthusiasm would not be wanting was amply demonstrated, he said, by the effect which Faraday’s fundamental experiment had produced in my imagination.
