The native of Norfolk is a typical Connecticut Yankee. Neither the wealth nor the social position of a new summer visitor can faze him. His dignity and self-respect forbid him to kowtow to any city swell. You will get his respectful attention if you deserve it; but you must earn it by your acts at Norfolk. You cannot command it by the power of anything you bring with you from the city to your summer vacation. While you are in Norfolk in summer, you are a summer boarder, an outsider, with traditions back of you which no native of Norfolk knows anything about. The force of all this was once so strongly impressed upon me that I never forgot it.
PUPIN’S RESIDENCE AT NORFOLK, CONN., WITH ADJOINING FARM BUILDINGS AND THE 500-TON SILO
Norfolk, like every New England town, has its annual town meetings, when the accounts of the town for the closing current year are carefully analyzed, appropriations are made for the coming year, and the selectmen and other administrative officers are elected. After I had become a landowner in Norfolk, I attended these town meetings regularly, and took part in their discussions, and there for the first time I became acquainted, by personal contact, with the fundamental elements of Anglo-Saxon civilization. At one of those town meetings I urged the improvement of the public highways, using the argument that better roads would attract more summer residents from the great cities and, I was certain, would advance the prosperity of the town. My arguments were received with respectful silence, and no sooner had I finished my speech than a Mr. Nettleton, the oldest voter in the township, got up and, turning his black goggles toward me, addressed me somewhat as follows:
“Our roads are just as good as they ever were; our ancestors taught us how to take care of them, and they are good enough for us. You say that if we improve them we would get more summer visitors, who, with their wealth, would increase the prosperity of our town. We don’t care for that kind of prosperity; it brings vanity and false pride into our New England homes, which you city people carry around with you.” Then, pointing his trembling finger at me, the old man exclaimed: “You, particularly, are guilty of this offense; you were the first who showed our simple people here how to swagger about this town on a horse with a rabbit tail.”
He referred to the almost universal custom at that time of docking a horse’s tail; the tails of my famous cobs as well as of my saddle-horse Clipper had been docked. After this speech, I suspended my propaganda for more up-to-date roads. Two years later, another incident occurred which is worth relating here. Mr. Carter, a Norfolk hunter of much local fame, had a fine pointer dog. He went to Europe one summer and left his dog in charge of a friend. But the dog ran away, and chased through all the woods of Norfolk, looking for his master. One day he came to my house; he was hungry, thirsty, tired out, and perfectly unhappy, having failed to find his master. I petted him, gave him fresh water to drink and some food to eat, and, while he was feasting, spoke to him and paid him many compliments on account of his affectionate attachment to his master. After his hearty meal he fell asleep near my feet on the piazza, and when he woke up he looked at me and seemed to be a much happier dog. From that moment on he followed me everywhere, running after my horse when I went out riding. One day I was cantering slowly along the road passing old Nettleton’s house. I saw the old man standing near the road, apparently waiting for somebody. When I was quite near him he beckoned me to stop, which I did, and he addressed me:
“Professor, I was very severe with you two years ago at that town meeting. But I did not know you; now I do. That dog there would not stay with anybody in this town, but he stays with you, and he follows you just as he followed his master. You are good to him, and the dog knows it. I have great confidence in a dog’s judgment, and I know now that you are a good man, just as good as any of the folks in this here New England town.” Then, stretching out his bony hand to me, he said: “Shake, forgive and forget, and let us be good friends. I shall never oppose you again at our annual town meetings. What’s good for you is good enough for me and for our little town.”
No offer of friendship was ever more welcome to me, and there never was a friendship of which I was more proud. Before many days had passed, the natives of Norfolk, from the illustrious Eldridge family, the angels of the town, down to the most humble day-laborer, felt the same toward me as old Nettleton did; that is, I always thought so, and I have never had any reason to think otherwise. No resolution moved by me at the annual town meetings ever failed to pass, but I always moved slowly, and not until I was quite sure that the motion was in the right direction. I would sooner have risked losing the good opinion of the trustees of Columbia University than that of the good people of Norfolk, my American Idvor. During my summer vacations in Norfolk, I have always felt just as much at home, and as happy and contented, as I did in my native Idvor when, during my student days in Europe, I spent my summer vacations there. Whenever I returned to my laboratory from my summer vacation in the bracing atmosphere of Norfolk, I have always felt that no problem there could resist the force of my stored-up nervous energy. That feeling early encouraged me in the belief that I had completely recovered from the breakdown of the spring of 1896, and this belief gave wings to every new effort.
When the news of the discovery of the Roentgen rays reached me in December of 1895, I was busy with the research of a problem which I had taken up in 1894, while making a foot tour in Switzerland. This is the problem which I took up again after the recovery from the breakdown of 1896. I must confess here that I never returned to X-ray research, because for a long time after my illness even the sight of an X-ray tube made me almost hysterical.
During the first half of the summer of 1894, Mrs. Pupin and I were staying at a little hotel on Lake Wannensee in Switzerland; I was preparing my lectures on the mathematical theory of sound. Lord Rayleigh’s treatise called my attention to the classical problem which ten years before I first saw in La Grange’s famous treatise. I had bought it second-hand in Paris, and had studied it in my mother’s garden at Idvor. The problem was a hypothetical one relating to an imaginary and not to a real physical case. It may be stated as follows: