But I must not depart too far from the main thread of my story. When it became known that the American Telephone and Telegraph Company had acquired the rights to my _high inductance wave conductors_, all kinds of legends were told about the invention and the fabulous price paid for it. Newspapers love legends, because the public loves them. The public is a child which loves to listen to fairy-tales. The only good that this publicity did was to help me sell my inventions relating to electrical tuning and rectification in wireless telegraphy. These lay idle for quite a number of years, and waited for further developments in the wireless art before they could be employed to advantage. Electrical tuning and electrical rectification are fundamental operations in the radio art to-day, but the wireless telegraphy of the early days is a distant and poor relation of our present radio art. The world had to wait quite some time for new discoveries which gave birth to the epoch-making inventions of new men, like Lee De Forest and Major E. H. Armstrong. It had to wait also for the great industrial research laboratories before electrical tuning and rectification could come into their own. In the early days of wireless telegraphy I suggested several novel developments which might give a fair chance to tuning and rectification, but I attracted scarcely any attention. The legends just mentioned made people a little more attentive. One morning a man stepped suddenly into my office at Columbia, and introduced himself as Mr. Green, organizer and promoter of the Marconi Company of America. He was full of action and looked like business. “Are your wireless inventions for sale?” asked Mr. Green, without much preliminary talk. “They are,” I answered, and I felt that my heart was quivering on account of the unexpected blow which this laconic question had given it. “How much?” asked Mr. Green. I gave him the first figure that came into my head, and he, not a bit daunted, asked whether I would take one-half in cash and one-half in stock. I asked him twenty-four hours to decide. “All right,” said he, and promised to call again the next day at the same hour. I should have been perfectly satisfied to accept the cash offer and close the deal even without the stock, but I was afraid that any over-anxiety on my part might scare him away. The next day he called and the deal was closed, he making a certain cash payment immediately and I agreeing to furnish certain documents before the final payment was made. I was fairly well acquainted with trading transactions in my native land; my father often took me to market-places where he bought and sold cattle and horses. I remember well the never-ending bartering which very often ended in a fizzle. The nearer you get to Constantinople the worse becomes the custom of this Oriental method of trading. Mr. Green had none of that Orientalism, and his utter indifference to the figures involved in the deal astonished me.