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.