Many a time during my early experiences in Routh’s drill school I thought of my mother’s words which described the steep and slippery climb which awaited me, and which was leading, as she had expressed it, to real stars from heaven. I felt the steepness of the climb, but I saw no star ahead of me. Routh was a great master of the mathematical technique, but he was not a creative genius; he was a virtuoso but not a composer. His principal concern was to drill his students in the art of solving those conventional problems which usually formed part of tripos examinations. The poetical element of dynamics, which thrills, was absent from his businesslike drills. The only star, I thought, which his students saw ahead of them was a high place in the tripos examinations, and that star did not attract me; recalling my mother’s story, I called it a tin star. I loved Routh and admired him much, but I did not admire the Cambridge tripos method of laying a foundation for mathematical physics. When Niven discovered my state of mind he sympathized, and he gave me a little book called “Matter and Motion” by Maxwell, a very small book written by a very great author. “You are not up to the mathematics of Maxwell’s great electrical treatise,” said Niven, as he handed me the little book, “but you will find no difficulties of that kind in this little book, which covers a very great subject.” It was first published in America in the Van Nostrand Magazine. No magazine ever performed a greater educational service. There was not only much poetical beauty and philosophical depth in this tiny and apparently most elementary book on dynamics, but there were also many illustrations of the close connection between this fundamental science and other departments of physical science. Maxwell’s presentation roused, and it also stimulated, the spirit of inquiry. 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. I knew then that I had seen one of the real stars of heaven of which my mother spoke. But without the light of Maxwell I would not have seen the light of Newton. It will be seen further below that Maxwell and Routh, Cambridge wranglers of 1854, were the representatives of different mental attitudes in Cambridge: Maxwell was the apostle of the new and Routh of the old spirit of Cambridge. Niven was very fond of reminding me of my first visit when I had told him that Cambridge without Maxwell had no attraction for me. After reading Maxwell’s little classic I told Niven that my opinion was, after all, not so funny and strange as he represented it.
A short digression is timely now. I went to Trinity College occasionally to spend a Sunday evening with Mr. Niven. One Sunday evening I walked around the historical Trinity quadrangle, waiting until Mr. Niven returned to his rooms from the evening service in the college chapel. The mysterious-looking light streaming through the stained-glass windows of the chapel and the heavenly music radiating from the invisible choir and organ commanded my attention. I stood motionless like a solitary spectre in the middle of the deserted and sombre quadrangle, and gazed, and listened, and dreamed. Yes, I dreamed of great Newton, the greatest of all Trinity dons; and I saw how, two centuries before, he was treading over the same spot where I was standing whenever he was returning from a Sunday evening service in the very chapel at which I was gazing. I dreamed also of Maxwell, another great Trinity don; and remembered that, five years before, the very same choir and organ to which I was listening had paid their last tribute to this great Cambridge man, when his earthly remains left the grief-stricken university on their last pilgrimage to Maxwell’s native Scotland. But I knew that his spirit had remained at Cambridge to inspire forever the coming generations of ambitious students.
I dreamed of other great Trinity College men whose spirits seemed to hover about the sombre quadrangle, rejoicing in the heavenly light and sound which radiated from the historical chapel where Newton and Maxwell worshipped in days gone by. I longed for the day when my alma mater, Columbia College, and other colleges in America, could offer such an inspiring scene to its students; and I wondered how soon that day would come. Niven told me the following story which, he thought, might answer this question:
A don of Magdalen College, Oxford, was asked by an American friend how long it would take to raise, in America, a lawn like the famous lawn of Magdalen College. “I do not know,” said the don, “but it took us over two centuries to do it here in Oxford.” Niven implied, of course, that it will take much more than two centuries to create at any American college that atmosphere which surrounded me at the Trinity College quadrangle on that memorable Sunday evening. It was the mysterious charm of that atmosphere which held me chained to Cambridge in spite of the fact that I did not believe that the Cambridge tripos method of laying a foundation in mathematical physics was fitting my particular case.
Students shift from university to university in continental Europe, migrating to places where they are attracted by the reputations of teachers who happen to be there. I went to Cambridge because I thought that Maxwell was there. But at Cambridge, and at Oxford too, it was not only the teacher who was there but also the teachers who had lived there during generations long past who determined the choice made by ambitious students. The great teachers in the mathematical sciences when I was there were Lord Rayleigh, the successor of Maxwell; John Crouch Adams, who, with Leverrier in France, shared in the great distinction of calculating from the perturbations in the orbit of Uranus the position of the still unknown planet Neptune; George Gabriel Stokes, the greatest mathematical physicist in Europe at that time, and the occupant of the professorial chair once held by great Newton. But that which brought the students in mathematical sciences to Cambridge was not only the lustre of the reputations of these great professors, but also the existence at Cambridge of a historical educational policy, to the development of which many great Cambridge mathematicians of generations long past had made lasting contributions. The mathematical tripos was the most concrete expression of this traditional policy.
It can be inferred from what I have already said that this traditional policy did not suit me. I do not think that it would have suited any American student of those days who had a taste for physics. I said once to a Cambridge friend that my landlady, Routh, and rowing shaped the daily events of my life. He saw my point and admitted that each one of them represented a powerful determining factor in the life of a Cambridge student who was preparing for the mathematical tripos examinations. Each one of them had its deep roots in ancient traditions from which it was difficult to deviate. Routh was a rare product and a loyal apostle of the tradition called the Mathematical Tripos. It was perhaps the most powerful of all Cambridge traditions and stood as immovable as the rock of Gibraltar; its great strength was the fact that it had produced many distinguished men of science. But nevertheless some of the greatest living Cambridge physicists of those days felt that it had defects and called for remedies. It was claimed that its method, having no direct connection with the nascent problems of scientific research, was artificial and unproductive.
Sir William Thomson, known later as Lord Kelvin, was among the first who called for speedy remedies. He was the second wrangler in 1845 and Stephen Parkinson was the senior wrangler. Thomson left Cambridge and went to Paris to get from the famous physicist Regnault what he could not get at Cambridge. After a year, when only twenty-two years old, he accepted a professorship in physics and directorship in physical research at the University of Glasgow. The long-headed Scotch were fully thirty years ahead of Cambridge in establishing a research laboratory in physics. Here Thomson worked out the scientific elements of the first Atlantic cable, and invented the instruments necessary for its operation. When I was in Cambridge the name of Thomson was attached to most measuring instruments employed in the electrical industries at that time, and he was also one of the leaders of abstract scientific thought. He represented in the popular mind the new spirit of Cambridge. Stephen Parkinson, Thomson’s superior in the tripos test of 1845, was still in Cambridge when I was there, and had to his credit a text-book on geometrical optics, with stereotyped problems, suitable for tripos examinations. He was not among those who called for a change in the traditional mathematical tripos examinations at Cambridge. Maxwell, undoubtedly inspired by Thomson, was one of the earliest leaders of the Cambridge movement which demanded a modification of the mathematical tripos, favoring more the spirit of research and less the art of solving cleverly formulated mathematical problems. The Cavendish Physics Laboratory, organized by Maxwell and first opened in 1874, was, according to Niven, a concrete expression of this movement.
A similar movement was taking place in the United States in those days. Among its leaders were President Barnard of Columbia College, and Joseph Henry, the first and the most distinguished secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. The date of the foundation of Johns Hopkins University falls within the early period of this movement. Niven told me that what Maxwell had been doing in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge was being done also by Maxwell’s friend, Professor Rowland, at Johns Hopkins, founded in Baltimore in 1876. Maxwell thought very highly of his young American friend, and undoubtedly recommended him strongly for the physics professorship at Johns Hopkins. Just as the establishment of the Cavendish Physics Laboratory in Cambridge marks the beginning of a great epoch in the development of physics in Cambridge and in Great Britain, so the organization of the physics laboratory at Johns Hopkins by Rowland marks a new and most fruitful era of scientific research in the United States. Rowland’s influence had not yet been felt at Columbia College when I was a student there, nor at many other American colleges of those days. But the forward movement soon commenced; and the people of this country do not understand yet as fully as they should how much they owe to the late Henry Augustus Rowland, whom I had the honor of knowing personally and whose friendship I enjoyed for several years. One of the aims of this simple narrative is to throw more light upon some obscure spots of this kind which need more illumination, and particularly upon the work of men like “Rowland of Troy, the doughty knight,” as Maxwell referred to him in his verses.
Another historical fact must be mentioned here which is very characteristic of the state of the science of physics in those days, and which is closely connected with the progress of this science as it appeared to me in the course of the last forty years. I mention now another great American physicist whose name, like that of Rowland, I first heard mentioned at Cambridge at that time, and that was Professor Josiah Willard Gibbs, of Yale. I know that many of my young colleagues will find it strange that I never had heard of Lord Rayleigh, of England, before I graduated at Columbia. What will they say when they hear that at that time I never had heard of famous Willard Gibbs, of Yale, New Haven, U. S. A.? Will they charge me with extraordinary ignorance, for which Columbia of those days was to blame? That would be unjust, as the following story will prove. One evening, after dinner, I was enjoying at the University Club, New York, the company of some twelve Yale graduates, and one of them was the learned Professor William Welch, dean of the Johns Hopkins Medical School. He was then president of the National Academy of Sciences. Most of my Yale friends present were of about my age or even older. I offered to wager that the majority of them would fail to give the name of the scientist who, in Doctor Welch’s opinion and in mine, was the greatest scientist that Yale had ever graduated. Not one of them mentioned Willard Gibbs. When I mentioned his name they frankly confessed that they had never heard of him before. Neither they nor Yale College of those days were to blame. Did my fellow students at Cambridge, who were training for the mathematical tripos, ever hear of him before they came to Cambridge? If they did, it was by accident, just as I heard of him by accident. Such was the spirit of the times in those days; and it was against this spirit that President Barnard of Columbia took up arms. He considered its existence a national calamity. But I shall return to this point later.