all day and most of the night reading about Faraday’s wonderful discovery. It was made over fifty years before that time, but I had never known anything about it, although Edison’s dynamos in his New York Pearl Street station had been supplying for over a year thousands of customers with electric power for incandescent lighting. Columbia College was not one of these customers for a long time after my graduation. When I finished my description of the experiment, and assured Rutherfurd that it was the most thrilling physical phenomenon that I had ever seen, and that I had remained awake almost all night after seeing it, he looked pleased, and informed me that this very phenomenon was the basis of Maxwell’s new Electrical Theory. That was the experiment which helped me to decide a very weighty question. Professor Rood had informed me that in recognition of my high standing in science as well as in letters I could choose either of two graduate fellowships, one in letters or one in science, each worth five hundred dollars a year. Either would have meant an additional three years of graduate study at Columbia. I was much tempted to turn to letters and continue my work with Merriam, the idol of all Columbia College students, including myself, who had felt the wonderful charm of his personality and of his profound and at the same time most picturesque classical scholarship. But the magic experiment which had told me the first story of Faraday’s great discoveries, and had aroused my dormant enthusiasm for physics, caused me to bid good-by to Merriam and turn to science, my first love. Nevertheless, I did not accept the fellowship in science and stay three years longer at Columbia; I preferred to take up the study of Faraday and of Maxwell in the United Kingdom, where these two great physicists were born and where they had made their great discoveries. Trustee Rutherfurd and his young nephew, my chum and classmate, John Armstrong Chanler, applauded my decision, and promised to assist me in my undertaking whenever assistance should be needed. Rutherfurd assured me that I should certainly succeed as well in my scientific studies in European universities as I had succeeded in my general cultural studies at Columbia College, if the revelations of the new world of physics, certainly in store for me, could arouse in me the same enthusiasm which had been aroused by the revelations of that new spirit and that new current of thought which had given birth to the American civilization. That this enthusiasm would not be wanting was amply demonstrated, he said, by the effect which Faraday’s fundamental experiment had produced in my imagination. [Illustration: PHOTOGRAPH OF PUPIN TAKEN IN 1883 WHEN HE GRADUATED AT COLUMBIA]