This incident in my native Idvor did me a lot of good. The experts in Berlin and the high officers in Vienna had been most polite and complimentary, and all their well-meant adulation coming on the top of the newspaper legends about my inventions might have turned my head and made me imagine that I was a “wizard.” Many an inventor and scientist has been ruined by being persuaded that he is a “wizard.” I have always believed that when a successful inventor is exposed to dangers of that kind he should, somewhat like that king of antiquity, hire somebody to whisper as often as possible into his ear: “You are an ordinary mortal.” Whenever I see now the Elliot Cresson Gold Medal of the Franklin Institute, the gold medal of the National Institute of Social Sciences, the Edison Medal of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the Hebert prize of the French Academy, and several other evidences of recognition in my possession, I always think of that professor who blamed his hard luck for his failure to infer from the loaded strings which hung daily over his head what I had inferred from La Grange’s imaginary string. It was, I know, a lucky day when on the 14th of July, 1884, I found that second-hand bookshop in the Quartier Latin in Paris and picked up there a copy of La Grange’s treatise. Without it, I might have remained as ignorant of the remarkable properties of a loaded string as that professor was. My answer to the peasant’s question, “How in the name of St. Michael do you manage to make a living there?” is this: “The humble herdsman of Idvor and the famous La Grange of Paris told me how to do it.” XII THE NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL The mathematical problems in the theory of electrical transmission, and the research of the behavior of materials employed in the construction of inductance-coils kept me busy, and made me forget that I was missing the splendid opportunities offered by New Physics, which I always represented symbolically by the picture of a vacuum-tube, because its origin dates from Roentgen’s discovery. My complete recovery from the shock of 1896 did not reconcile me to the vacuum-tube, until several years had wiped out the memory which my mind had associated with it. By that time I had dropped too far behind the men who were leading in the procession of the revelations which New Physics had disclosed to man.