Then, there is no Serb boy who has not heard that beautiful Russian song by Lyermontoff, the great Russian poet, which says:
“Lonely I wander over the country road,
And in the darkness the stony path is glimmering;
Night is silent and the plains are whispering
To God, and star speaketh to star.”
Lyermontoff was a son of the Russian plains. He saw the same burning stars in the blackness of a summer midnight sky which I saw. He felt the same thrill which David felt and through his Psalms transmitted to me during those watchful nights of fifty years ago. I pity the city-bred boy who has never felt the mysterious force of that heavenly thrill.
Sound and light being associated in my young mind of fifty years ago with divine operations by means of which man communicates with man, beast with beast, stars with stars, and man with his Creator, it is obvious that I meditated much about the nature of sound and of light. I still believe that these modes of communication are the fundamental operations in the physical universe and I am still meditating about their nature. My teachers in Panchevo rendered some assistance in solving many of the puzzles which I met in the course of these meditations. Kos, my Slovenian teacher, who was the first to tell me the story of Franklin and his kite, was a great help. He soon convinced me that sound was a vibration of bodies. This explanation agreed with the Serbian figure of speech which says:
“My heart quivers like the melodious string under the guslar’s bow.”
I also felt the quivering air whenever during my term of service as guardian of the oxen I tried my skill at the Serbian flute. Few things excited my interest more than the operations of the Serbian bagpiper as he forced the air from his sheepskin bellows and made it sing by regulating its passage through the pipes. The operations which the bagpiper called adjustment and tuning of the bagpipes commanded my closest attention. I never dreamed then that a score of years later I should do a similar operation with an electrical circuit. I called it “electrical tuning,” a term which has been generally adopted in wireless telegraphy. But nobody knows that the operation as well as the name were first suggested to me by the Serbian bagpiper, some twenty years before I made the invention in 1892.
Skipping over several sections of my story, I will say now that twenty years after my invention of electrical tuning a pupil of mine, Major Armstrong, discovered the electrical vacuum-tube oscillator, which promises to revolutionize wireless telegraphy and telephony. A similar invention, but a little earlier, was made by another pupil of mine, Mr. Vreeland. Both these inventions in their mode of operation remind me much of the operation of Serbian bagpipes. Perhaps some of those thrills which the Serbian bagpiper stirred up in me in my early youth were transferred to my pupils, Armstrong and Vreeland.