My scientific friends in New York saw in the construction of my electrical resonator and in its employment for selective detection of alternating currents of definite frequency a very suitable means for practising harmonic telegraphy, first suggested by Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. They finally persuaded me to apply for a patent and I did so. I often regretted it, because it involved me in a most expensive and otherwise annoying legal contest. Two other inventors had applied for a patent on the same invention. One of them was an American, and the other a French inventor, and each of them was backed by a powerful industrial corporation. A college professor with a salary of two thousand five hundred dollars per annum cannot stand a long legal contest when opposed by two powerful corporations; but it is a curious psychological fact that when one’s claim to an invention is disputed he will fight for it just as a tigress would fight for her cub. The fight lasted nearly eight years and I won it. I was declared to be the inventor, and the patent was granted to me. But a patent is a piece of paper worth nothing until somebody needs the invention. I waited a long time before that somebody came, and when he finally showed up I had almost forgotten that I had made the invention. In the meantime I had nothing but a piece of paper for all my pains, which nearly wrecked me financially. Just about that time the newspapers reported that a young Italian student by the name of Marconi, while experimenting with Hertzian waves, had demonstrated that a Hertzian oscillator will send out electrical waves which will penetrate much longer distances when one of its sides is connected to earth. “Of course it will,” said I, “the grounded oscillator takes the earth into closer partnership.” When as a herdsman’s assistant on the pasturelands of my native Idvor I stuck my knife into the ground and struck its wooden handle, I knew perfectly well that the ground was a part of the vibrating system, and that the sound-producing stroke was taken up by the ground much better than when I struck the knife-handle without sticking the knife into the ground. But I also knew that unless the boy who was listening pressed his ear against the ground he would not hear very much. It was, therefore, quite obvious to me that the best detector for a Hertzian oscillator which is grounded must be another Hertzian oscillator which is also connected to the ground. Grounding of the sending and of the receiving Hertzian oscillators was in fact the fundamental claim of the Marconi invention. Marconi, in my opinion, was unwittingly imitating the young herdsmen of Idvor when, figuratively speaking, he stuck his electrical knives into the ground for the purpose of transmitting and receiving electrical vibrations, but the imitation was a very clever one; very obvious indeed as soon as it was pointed out, like all clever things.