Once I asked Professor Rowland whether anybody had ever suggested to him resigning from Johns Hopkins University on the ground that in favoring the alternating current system for the Niagara Falls Power Transmission plant he had made himself liable to a charge of heresy. “Heresy?” said he; “I thought that my heresy was worth a big fee, and when the company attempted to cut it down the courts sustained my claim.” An interesting bit of history is attached to this. When the Niagara Power and Construction Company objected to the size of the fee which Rowland charged for his services as scientific adviser, and asked for a reduction, the matter was referred to the court. During Rowland’s cross-examination the defendant’s lawyer, the late Joseph Choate, asked him the question: “Who, in your opinion, is the greatest physicist in the United States?” Rowland answered without a moment’s hesitation: “I am.” The judge smiled, but agreed with the witness, and his agreement was in harmony with the opinion of all scientific men. Rowland justified his apparently egotistical answer by the fact that as a witness on the stand he was under oath to speak the truth; he certainly spoke the truth when he testified that he was the leading physicist in the United States.
Rowland’s interest in the electrical science and its technical applications helped much to dissipate the notion, entertained by many, that it was empirical and still in its infancy. Bogus inventors always encouraged this superstition. The attention which Rowland and his former pupil, the late Doctor Louis Duncan, devoted to electrical engineering at Johns Hopkins University helped much to raise the status of electrical engineering. When the new General Electric Company was organized by the consolidation of the Edison General Electric Company and the Thomson-Houston Company, Elihu Thomson became the chief scientific adviser of the new corporation, and its highest court of appeals in scientific matters. I remember telling my colleague, Crocker, that if the Thomson-Houston Company had contributed nothing else than Elihu Thomson to the new corporation it would have contributed more than enough. Thomson, in my opinion, was the American Siemens, and Rowland was the American Helmholtz, of the new era in the history of American industries—the era of close co-operation between abstract science and engineering. With these two men among the leaders of the electrical science and the electrical industry in the United States, the senseless opposition to the alternating current system of power distribution began to wane. It vanished quickly after the Electrical Congress of 1893. The first visible result of the co-operation between abstract science and the technical arts was the splendid power plant at Niagara Falls, and later the electrical power distribution system in the New York subways, in which the alternating and the direct current systems supplemented each other most admirably.
HENRY AUGUSTUS ROWLAND (1848–1901)
First Director of the Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University
The scientific spirit of Rowland’s laboratory and lecture-room was felt everywhere in the electrical industries; it was felt also in our educational institutions. His and his students’ researches in solar spectra and in other problems of higher physics made that spirit the dominating influence among the rising generation of physical science in America. It was universally acknowledged that Johns Hopkins was a real university. The intellectual movement in favor of higher scientific research, first inaugurated by Joseph Henry, President Barnard of Columbia College, and Doctor John William Draper, in the early seventies, was marching on steadily under the leadership of Rowland when I started my academic career at Columbia, thirty-four years ago, and he led on like a “doughty knight of Troy,” as Maxwell used to call him. It was the spirit of Johns Hopkins which inspired the generation of the early nineties in its encouragement of the movement for the development of the American university. Some enthusiasts at Columbia College went even so far as to advocate the abolition of the college curriculum and the substitution of a Columbia University for Columbia College; I was not among these enthusiasts, because I knew only too well the historical value of Columbia College and of other American colleges. What would the University of Cambridge be without its ancient colleges? College lays the foundation for higher citizenship; the university lays the foundation for higher learning.
By courtesy of the Columbia University Library
JAMES CLERK MAXWELL (1831–1879)
First Director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University