“Marriage gives that fulness to life which nothing else can give,” said Helmholtz when I saw him again in Berlin and informed him that I was married and that I had been promised an academic position at Columbia College. He approved my dropping the experimental research and substituting in its place a mathematical research in physical chemistry. This research was finished in the early spring and I sent it to Helmholtz who was then in Baden-Baden. He telegraphed: “Your successful effort approved and accepted.” Never before nor since did I ever receive a telegram which made me more happy. The examinations gave me no serious trouble, and in the late spring of that year I had my doctor’s degree and became a citizen in the world of science. The three theses which, according to old German custom, every candidate seeking promotion to the dignity of a doctor of philosophy must frame and defend publicly are given here, in order to show my final mental attitude which was formulated by my scientific studies in Europe.
I. Instruction in Physics in the preparatory schools should be as much as possible a practical one.
II. The Thermodynamic methods of Gibbs, von Helmholtz, and Planck form the most reliable foundation for the study of those physical processes which we cannot analyze by ordinary dynamics.
III. The Electromagnetic Theory of Light deserves more attention than it has received so far in university lectures.
Usually these theses, appended to German doctor dissertations, are not taken very seriously either by the candidate, who is to be promoted, or by anybody else. But I took my theses very seriously. The first summed up President Barnard’s doctrine relating to scientific instruction, which I described before in connection with my description of the American movement favoring scientific research in American colleges and universities; the second summed up my admiration for the new science of physical chemistry first started by our own Josiah Willard Gibbs; and the third summed up my love for the Faraday-Maxwell electromagnetic science. On these three questions in physical science I had, I thought, quite clear and definite ideas; and that gave me much confidence that I was about to return to the United States sufficiently equipped to render service in return for some of the many favors which I had received.
As the ship which carried me back to the United States entered New York Harbor I saw on my right Castle Garden; it looked the same as it did fifteen years before, when I first entered on the immigrant ship, and it reminded me of that earlier day. I said to my bride, who was standing by my side, that I did not carry much more money into New York Harbor than I did fifteen years before, when I first looked upon Castle Garden, and yet I felt as rich as a Crœsus. I felt, I told her, that I owned the whole of the United States, because I was sure that the United States owned me; that I had an ideal American bride, who had assured me that I had lived up to the standards of an ideal American bridegroom; and that I had a fine position in a great American institution and strong hopes of filling it to everybody’s satisfaction. I enumerated all these and other things to my bride and wound up by saying, jokingly: “I have also some prospects which modesty prevents me from mentioning,” and then I added: “These are the only worldly goods with which I thee endow.”
X
THE FIRST PERIOD OF MY ACADEMIC CAREER AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
The new “Department of Electrical Engineering in the School of Mines of Columbia College” had announced its courses of instruction quite a number of months before I arrived in New York. The late Francis Bacon Crocker, at that time the newly appointed instructor in electrical engineering and my future colleague and life-long friend, had been consulted with regard to these courses, and he was most liberal to the theoretical side, which was to be my share of the instruction. He attached much importance to the fundamental theory, although he was a practical engineer. The new department was to be independent of the other scientific departments. We had some difficulty, however, in maintaining that independence; the older departments of engineering showed a disposition to claim some right of guardianship over the new infant department. For instance, many chemists thought that electrical engineering was largely chemistry on account of the storage batteries, the galvanic cells, and the electrochemical processes which formed an important part of the electrical operations in the early history of applied electricity. Others asserted that, since mechanical engineering attended to the design and the construction of electromagnetic generators and to the power plant which furnished the driving power, electrical engineering was, therefore, largely mechanical engineering.
Crocker and I maintained that there is an electrical science which is the real soul of electrical engineering, and that every other abstract science or its application was an incident only in electrical engineering. We won out in spite of the fact that at other institutions of higher learning in the United States electrical engineering was taught in the departments of physics or of mechanical engineering. But it was not an easy matter in those days to persuade people that the electrical science with its applications was then, or that it ever would be, big enough to need a department of its own, like, for instance, civil engineering.