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. [Illustration: HENRY AUGUSTUS ROWLAND (1848-1901) First Director of the Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University]