The Autobiography of Robert A Millikan

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THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY

OF

ROBERT A. MILLIKAN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

DEDICATION 6

FOREWORD 7

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 9

INTRODUCTION 10

ILLUSTRATIONS 13

1—EARLY CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION, OR MIDWEST PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION IN THE SEVENTIES 14

2—COLLEGIATE AND GRADUATE EDUCATION 22

3—EUROPEAN CONTACTS IN THE NINETIES 30

4—EARLY TEACHING, ORGANIZING AND TEXTBOOK WRITING AT CHICAGO 38

5—CHICAGO FRIENDSHIPS, COURTSHIP, AND MARRIAGE 46

6—EARLY RESEARCH ACTIVITIES AT CHICAGO 52

7—MY OIL-DROP VENTURE (e) 60

8—INCREASED RESPONSIBILITIES AND A FURTHER LOOK AT EUROPE IN 1912 74

9—THE EXPERIMENTAL PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE OF THE PHOTON—EINSTEIN’S PHOTOELECTRIC EQUATION 84

10—EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES AT CHICAGO 90

11—THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AND THE BEGINNINGS OF THE NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL 103

12—MOBILIZING SCIENCE FOR WAR 112

13—THE SUBMARINE MENACE IN WORLD WAR I 127

14—BIG AND LITTLE EVENTS IN 1918 137

15—TRANSITION AND RECONVERSION YEARS 150

16—MY TRANSFER TO CALTECH 162

17—MY EARLY YEARS AT C. I. T. 171

18—C.I.T. PROJECTS 185

19—THE ROAD TO PEACE 194

20—FORKS ON THE ROAD 204

21—THE TWO SUPREME ELEMENTS IN HUMAN PROGRESS 215

APPENDIX A 222

APPENDIX B 225

Some Details of the Proof of Einstein’s Photoelectric Equation 225

APPENDIX C 228

Participants in the First Conference with the European Scientific Mission 228

APPENDIX D 229

Establishment in May, 1918, of the National Research Council’s Research Information Service 229

APPENDIX E 231

Organization and Chief Administrative Personnel of the National Research Council after July 1, 1918 231

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 232

DEDICATION

To My Wife Greta Blanchard Millikan

FOREWORD

by

Sir George Paget Thomson, Kt., M.A. (Cantab.), LL.D. (Aberdeen), Sc.D. (Dublin), D.Sc. (Lisbon), F.R.S., Nobel Laureate in Physics 1937. Professor of Physics, Imperial College of Science and Technology, London.

This is the record of a great scientist teacher and man of affairs as told by himself. In his time American physics has changed from being a poor relation, as far as numbers and resources—though not quality—are concerned, to a position in which by its sheer size it makes the efforts of the rest of the world seem almost puny. In this change, Robert Millikan, now the acknowledged doyen of American physicists, has played a leading part. He describes here in delightfully simple language the main contributions which he made to fundamental physics; the proof of Einstein’s hypothesis of the photo-electric effect; the proof of the equality of charge among electrons; the use of hot-spark high vacuum discharges to fill a gap in our knowledge of radiations. He says little of the large amount of work he has inspired in other fields, such as cosmic rays.

The stones which Millikan has added to the building of science are massive, fundamental and well laid. That structure is, I believe, the greatest achievement of our age, ranking with Elizabethan drama or Jewish prophecy. So far its practical achievements are more in men’s minds than the intellectual revolution which it implies; they think of it in terms of television or atomic bombs, but these are only by-products. They are important indeed because they compel, and somewhat too rudely, a belief that these new ideas somehow correspond to a reality, however strange and far-fetched they appear. The great value of the book is as a record of the philosophy, the very human philosophy, of a man of singular sympathy and clearness of vision, who has been concerned with these ideas throughout a long life.

Millikan’s philosophy is one of restrained optimism; he believes in humanity in religion and in science, and that they form a harmonious whole. He is essentially an American, but an American who sees the weakness of his country no less and no more clearly than he sees her virtues, who can appreciate the good in the Germany of his youth, not yet wholly surrendered to militarism, and pay generous tribute to the qualities and the motives of Britain.

In World War I Millikan and George Hale, the astronomer of Mount Wilson, were the leaders in organizing American science in the Allied cause. I can never forget the inspiration that he gave the young men, American and British, who worked under him, of whom I had the honour to be one. Yet with all his organizing ability he has always withstood firmly the centralization of science in the United States, and there is no doubt that his influence in this aspect has been a salutary force. Government control is a danger which science has to face in all countries, and his views on it deserve careful study.

Unlike some other famous scientists, Millikan has always taken his teaching duties very seriously. He has the rare knack of writing a textbook which is exhilarating. The teaching of physics all over the world owes much to him.

In this mature and thoughtful record of a life successful far beyond the common lot we read the history not only of a great scientific leader but of a truly simple and lovable character seeing the world clear-eyed.

G. P. THOMSON

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to express his thanks to the following firms and persons for their kind permission to reproduce the material quoted in this book:

To Mr. John Nesbitt, for permission to reproduce an excerpt from his Westinghouse broadcast of January 17, 1943.

To Mr. Gano Dunn, for the personal letter which appears in Chapter 12.

To the National Research Council, for permission to use the letter addressed to Dr. George E. Hale, then Chairman of the Council, and written by J. S. Ames.

To the Reader’s Digest, for permission to quote from the article entitled First Objective: Peace by William Hard and Andre Visson, which originally appeared in the Digest for August, 1948.

To the University of Chicago Press, for permission to reprint three figures from the author’s book, Electrons (+ and —).

To Ginn and Company, for permission to quote from Unit 2, The Laws of Force and Motion, by Millikan, Gale, and Coyle.

To The Rockefeller Foundation, for permission to publish a letter to the author from George E. Vincent, former President of the Foundation.

INTRODUCTION

When one takes a world outlook one cannot help realizing how extraordinarily different have been the life experiences of the men and women who have lived from 1868 to 1948 from those who have lived in any other period of comparable length in human history. For it has been the lot of all the generations of mankind up to the two generations which my life span has covered to leave the world at death very much the same kind of place they found it at birth. But this will not be true of those of us who come from the vintage of ‘68. Our ordinary life experiences bear little resemblance to those of my father and much less to those of my grandfather.

This book represents an effort to record and appraise some of the changes which have come under the eyes of one particular observer of the rapidly changing scene. I shall begin, however, in 1825, some forty years before my birth.

My grandfather, Daniel Franklin Millikan, was a typical American pioneer of Scotch descent, who, after learning the trade of shoemaker and tanner in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and after marrying his master’s daughter, Aurelia Pease, decided in 1825 to leave the ancestral Millikan farm in the Berkshire Hills near Beckett, Massachusetts, and to try his fortunes in the newly opened and less rocky, but heavily timbered lands of the Western Reserve in Ohio. There my father was born in 1834 and when he was four years old the family, like most of those Anglo-Saxon pioneering families, sold its cleared and appreciated farms, took its lares and penates, its horses and cattle and trekked westward again in covered wagons (the railroad first got through to Chicago in 1839) to settle this time on the banks of the Rock River not far from the present town of Sterling, Illinois.

The conditions of that migration, the motives prompting it, the mode of travel of the emigrants, their various ways of meeting their needs and solving their problems, their whole outlook upon life, were extraordinarily like those which existed four thousand years earlier when Abraham trekked westward from Ur of the Chaldees.

In 1873, as a child of five, I well remember watching my grandfather—composite farmer, butcher, tanner, shoemaker—make my first pair of shoes, as those early pioneers had to do for all the members of their families. The stupendous changes that have occurred since that time are not merely in the external conditions under which the average man, at least in this Western World, passes his life on earth, but in his normal reactions to the events of his daily life; e.g. his superstitions, such as the taboo on the number 13 or on Friday sailings, or his confidence in the efficacy of a dried potato in the pocket to keep off rheumatism. Indeed, I suspect that the changes that have taken place during the last century in the average man’s fundamental beliefs, in his philosophy, in his conception of religion, in his whole world outlook, are greater than the changes that occurred during the preceding four thousand years all put together.

Why has it been so? Unquestionably because of the growth since the middle of the nineteenth century in man’s knowledge and control of nature—that is, because of science and its applications to human life, for these have bloomed in my time as no one in history had ever dreamed could be possible.

Look next at a few of the giant intellects that made science bloom in that first of the two generations that cover my life span: Maxwell, the chief creator in 1873 (the date of publication of his great book) of the age of electricity; Sir George Stokes, who built the base of fluid mechanics; Lord Kelvin, pioneer in thermodynamics; Lord Rayleigh, supreme analyst of sound and light; Michelson and Lorentz, who established the foundation on which relativity rests; Helmholtz, who helped mightily in the introduction of the principle of the conservation of energy; Poincaré, world referee on the philosophy of physics; Boltzmann, master of statistical reasoning; J. J. Thomson, of gas-conduction fame. Will such a group of giants ever appear in any other single generation of men? I had the good fortune to know all of them, save Maxwell and Stokes.

Some of these great intellects who developed nineteenth-century physics probably thought they had sounded the depths, at least of the physical universe. But in fact they had only made a beginning. For what is perhaps the most important contribution of the physicists whose work thus far has lain chiefly in the twentieth century as distinct from the nineteenth, men with whom I have sometimes worked intimately and long—physicists like Rutherford, the Curies, Bohr, Einstein, Planck, Dirac, Pauli, Heisenberg, Compton, and others equally outstanding? Has it not been to show that the greatest blunder which the earlier scientists had made consisted in extending their generalizations with undue assurance into regions in which they had not been experimentally tested—in other words, the mistake of thinking that they could come much nearer to explaining the universe than they actually succeeded in doing? Has not dogmatism, defined as assertiveness without knowledge, been just as prevalent in the history of science as in the history of theology, and just as mischievous, too? Listen to Lagrange, greatest of French mathematical physicists, who called Newton not only the greatest genius that has ever existed, but also the most fortunate, for, said he, there is but one universe and it can happen to but one man in the world’s history to be the interpreter of its laws. What an assumption! True, Newton himself was too great a man to make such a blunder, for he not only described himself as a child picking up a seashell from the shore of the great ocean of knowledge, but also wrote in his Optics, "The main business of natural philosophy is to argue from phenomena without feigning (i.e. falsely asserting) hypotheses and to deduce causes from effects till we come to the very first cause, which is certainly not mechanical." Thus spake one generally regarded as probably the greatest analytical mind of all history.

To Newton, says historian Sir William Dampier, God is immanent in nature. All of us scientists, if we are going to be effective and well-balanced human beings, certainly need counterirritants for our overspecialization. Even physics, as some current pronouncements too frequently reveal, does not conduce to great breadth of understanding of human actions and especially of human values.

But now turn for a moment to other influences aside from those of great personalities which have been responsible for the stupendous changes in human life since the middle of the nineteenth century. The two greatest wars in history have occurred, and these have brought in their train enormous changes, not only in many of our individual lives but in the importance, for example, of the United States among the nations. I myself have been thrown into administrative responsibilities, into new international movements, into new developments in higher education, and into new activities in connection with the place of science, both in the public schools and in the universities, colleges, and technical schools. In all these activities I have had to travel widely and prepare addresses for graduating classes and for the public generally. Some of these addresses put my views into better form than I would probably be capable of doing at the present time. Thus, I suspect that the best writing I have ever done is contained in the little book published by the Yale University Press in 1927 under the title Evolution in Science and Religion. I have therefore borrowed much from these earlier writings in preparing these personal recollections and reflections, and in so doing have not followed rigidly the chronological order customary in an autobiography.

To the reader who is primarily interested, not so much in the story of my life as in my underlying and guiding philosophy, I would recommend that he read first the last chapter, 21, which represents the best thinking I am able to put into a few pages on the greatest problem of human existence.

I wish to make grateful acknowledgment to my wife, Greta Millikan, to my secretary, Inga Howard, to my lifelong friend and colleague on the faculty of the University of Chicago, Elizabeth Wallace, and to Mr. William Hale Barton, science writer, who have read the manuscript and encourage me to believe that it is not beyond the comprehension of a twelfth-grade student who has had an elementary course in physics. Readers lacking that qualification may wish to skip Chapters 7 and 9, but should find the remaining chapters understandable.

ILLUSTRATIONS

R. A. Millikan with A. A. Noyes and G. E. Hale

Michelson, Einstein and Millikan

At the Brussels Conference, 1921

1—EARLY CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION, OR MIDWEST PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION IN THE SEVENTIES{1}

IN THE YEAR 1872 in the little town of Morrison, Illinois, my two-year-old brother and I were playing in the dust underneath our front porch where our hens were wallowing. His toy was a large pewter spoon. Upon my refusal to eat the spoonful of dust which he offered me, he said if I would not eat it he would eat it himself. I can see him now, running to Mother and screaming with wide-open mouth full of dry dust. Thus early was I introduced to the experimental-project method in education.

The second scene is at the age of five, for it was then that I took my first lesson on the pitch and reflection of sound. As I lay in bed of a foggy morning in the small town of McGregor, Iowa, just opposite Prairie du Chien, whither the family had moved in March, 1873, I listened, not with fear but with some awe, to the reverberations from the bluffs, that there flank the great river, of the booming foghorn notes continuously sounding from the steamboats which at that time plied the Mississippi River. That was my first lesson in acoustics, and the weird effect of those deep, loud, bellowing sounds is with me still. Also, the thunder storms, with the accompanying lightning flashes, had in very early youth a strange fascination for me. Such displays are at their best in the upper Mississippi Valley. They stimulate the senses—sight, sound, and smell. My younger brother and I were fond of wrapping ourselves up in a blanket on our front porch and watching the spectacle. It never occurred to us to be afraid.

Next lesson. My father took me, still at the age of five, on one of those river passenger boats when he had to go from McGregor down to Davenport, Iowa. Two events on that trip remain vividly fixed in memory. The boat stuck on a sand bar, and as the crew took the soundings around her I heard the cries Mark twain, which Samuel Clemens had heard before on those same boats and which acquired fame as his pseudonym. There the foundations were laid for my interest both in hydrostatic measurements and in the study of American humour as exemplified by Mark Twain.

But that trip also introduced me to the field of industrial relations, and taught me something about the laws of the inclined plane. For when we stopped at Clinton a gang of a dozen or more Negroes began to roll many barrels in a row up the gangplank into the boat. One poor Negro, who did not fully understand the laws of inclined planes, lost his barrel on the gangplank and it plunged into the river, and my tender soul was shocked and my young indignation aroused by the tongue-lashing which the gang boss proceeded to administer. I registered the five-year-old conviction that that was not the way to get the best service out of labour—a very important lesson.

Only a few weeks later Father took his three little boys, aged seven, five and three, in a rowboat across the Mississippi for a day of fishing at the mouth of the Wisconsin River. A big log raft was coming down the river, and just as we were passing it a fish, say twenty inches long, jumped out of the river and flopped about on the raft. A man rushed out of the lumberman’s cabin on the raft and caught it with his hands. This was my introduction to the fisherman’s art. I recognized in the raftsman a good fly-fisherman.

My father tied our rowboat to a rough floating dock on the shore, and while he was arranging his fishing tackle several rods away, I decided to entertain myself by jumping back and forth between the prow of the boat and the mooring platform. But the boat pushed back as I jumped forward, and so I fell into the water and would not be here now had not my father rushed around and pulled me out from under the edge of the platform where I was headed for a five-year-old’s watery grave. This was my first laboratory experiment on the principle of inertia. It introduced me to Newton’s third law of motion.

Before we moved away from McGregor a year later I had my first hard struggle with conscience and received a D grade in my first course in ethics. My father had offered his three boys five cents each if we would go a week without clearing our throats in an unpleasant way, which he thought was becoming a habit. I stood it as long as I could—it was terrible restraint—and then I went out behind the barn and had a snorting debauch. When the nickel distribution time arrived and I was asked whether I had earned the reward, I was not hardened criminal enough as yet to lie baldly, but answered that I had slipped only once or twice. This, I convinced myself, was quite true if I counted each debauch as a single slip, but I had been terribly tortured with doubts in reaching a satisfactory definition of a unit event. Father, doubtless seeing what had been going on inside my awakening conscience, did not press the point, but gave me the nickel merely with the comforting remark that he thought I had earned it. A great weight dropped from my soul. I had had an introduction to moral philosophy and also to international statesmanship, for the essence of statesmanship, I believe, is found in the art of finding a formula.

At the age of six I had also begun to investigate experimentally the laws of falling bodies, for in rolling around on the back porch floor with my brother I rolled through a narrow opening underneath the railing and had a clean, free fall of about eight feet. I landed on the cellar stairs and regained consciousness a few minutes later, but too late to have retained as a result of the project the correct value of the acceleration of gravity, 32 feet per second per second. And so, in spite of the absence in McGregor of a formalized progressive education movement, it will be seen that by the age of seven I had actually made a satisfactory start on the road to a well-rounded modern education.

In 1875 the family moved to Maquoketa, Iowa, a town of three thousand inhabitants forty miles northwest of Clinton, Iowa, where my education continued for the next eleven years. Although fifteen miles from the river, it was classed as a river town, a classification which might be taken to mean that it had its full quota of saloons (thirteen of them) and that the staunch republicanism of most Iowa towns would be here diluted by a strong democratic vote, which in Iowa at that time was for most purposes identifiable with the saloon vote. I mention this merely because, for most of those eleven years, we lived on Platt Street, where all the saloons were located, and I was exposed to many of the rougher influences that are often found in the small Midwest town. I have never felt that the rougher influences did me any lasting harm, and they contributed to my realistic understanding of life. I got the other side at home. And on the whole Maquoketa had more than its share of families of background, ideals and culture, the majority of them of New England origin, though a number of prominent families, perhaps a third of them, stemmed from Virginia. However, these last soon lost their Southern accent, their children completely so, engulfed as they were in the all-conquering Middle-West speech imported from western New England and having in it the Scotch and Scotch-Irish r. For I estimate that this speech, with small variations, is used, perhaps unfortunately, by eighty-five or ninety per cent of the English-speaking inhabitants of the New World.

In the interim between leaving McGregor and going to Maquoketa to live, my mother and her five children went to stay for a few months at the home of my grandfather, Daniel Franklin Millikan, in Lyndon, Illinois, eight miles south of Morrison.

Like most of the Western pioneers, the Daniel Millikan family had a wonderfully educative, self-contained economy, my grandfather running the farm, himself killing the cattle, tanning their hides, and, from them, making with his own hands the shoes for the family, while my grandmother spun the yarn and made the clothes. It was in that family that I lived for a few months in my seventh year. Here I had an impressive object lesson in self-help, saving, industry, and home economics. Even in the case of a boy of seven, seeing a life like that goes much farther than words ever do in creating habits and moulding character. Indeed, example is of course the supreme teacher. All of our pedagogy and all of our educational organization, no matter how many billions we spend upon it, is trivial and impotent in comparison with home example. When we deplore the tendencies of modern youth a little observation will generally show where the trouble lies. It is the behaviour of the parents, not of the children, that sets the modern pace toward cocktail parties and kindred disintegrating and unwholesome influences. That in the United States we spend nine billion dollars per year on alcoholic drinks alone, more than twice as much as we spend on our whole public school system and more than we spend on all our private and public schools combined, constitutes a terrific indictment of the intelligence of the American people, indeed of the whole of our Anglo-Saxon civilization.

I shall presently say something about the formal side of education in Maquoketa, some of which was very good, better than much that I see about me in the public schools today. But the part of my education that I got outside of school in those eleven years was superb. We lived on the very edge of town, with a big pasture a hundred yards away, and beyond it the primitive woods (for Maquoketa means Big Timber) through which ran the Maquoketa River. My father and mother brought up a family of six, three boys and three younger girls, on the small-town preacher’s salary of $1,300 a year. We wore two-piece suits of blue jeans and no shoes from the close of school at the end of May until its beginning about the tenth of September. Our yard contained about an acre of ground in which Father and his three boys raised potatoes, corn, melons, and all manner of garden truck along with strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and currants, and in the winter we boys sawed ten sticks of four-foot wood a day so long as our ten cords lasted. In vacation we were required to work mornings in the garden, but the afternoons we had free for our play.

Practically every afternoon for eight or ten years in summertime Father collected his three boys and a dozen others from the neighbourhood and accompanied us down through the meadows and the woods to the river, where we swam, and dived from an eight-foot-high bank, played in the sand, rode down the river on logs and shot the rapids through a break in an old dam. After we came back we played baseball, sheepfold, prisoner’s base, anti over, or any one of a dozen games known to all boys. We kept two cows of our own which I milked twice a day for five or six years—on two well-remembered occasions at 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, too. For some three years, in order to earn money for my savings account such as Mother taught all her children to set up, I tended to a neighbour’s horse, milked his cow, and mowed his large lawn. One of the finest of youthful experiences came when one of our farmer neighbours let us three Millikan boys break three of his colts for riding. The thrill of riding bareback on a racing horse is something never to be forgotten.

We often got up at three o’clock in the morning to see the circus come to town, or to get down to the river to fish when the biting was best. We always spat on our bait for luck, and did all the other things recounted in William Allen White’s Court of Boyville. Each fall we gathered many sacks of hazelnuts and walnuts for our winter supply. As we grew older we rigged up in our barn, the rendezvous of all the neighbourhood boys, a turning pole and parallel bars, and we invested in boxing gloves and ten-pound dumb-bells. The life we led kept me in such good physical condition that I never had an absence in my four-year high-school course. I later earned most of my way through college by acting as student gymnasium director—a job which I got simply because I had acquired some competence and the necessary muscles in our old barn. I was urged at one time to make physical education a life work and had the road all opened for it, but chose another field instead.

It will have been noticed that there was a fair amount of work and thrift in that extracurricular education. We boys raised and sold dozens of chickens each year. Indeed, beginning at the age of fourteen I spent summer vacations working ten hours a day in a local barrel-head factory at a dollar a day, a wage of which I was very proud. It made me so cocky that I proposed to my parents thenceforth to be independent of them save for board and room—a contract which I also kept.

Upon graduation from the Maquoketa High School in 1885, just after my seventeenth birthday, I learned shorthand and acted as a court reporter for a small part of a year, for I did not start away to school until fifteen months after graduation. Six dollars a day, the regular court reporter’s wage, looked like a million to me. I have always been especially content with that court experience, for watching court procedure, seeing juries empanelled and cases tried in the Jackson County circuit court, gave me a respect for the law and the courts which some Americans, even of the greatest prominence, never seem to have acquired. Such was the extracurricular education of the 1880’s in a small Iowa town.

And now, turn to the classroom and back to the year 1875 when the Millikans landed in Maquoketa. The first year thereafter my mother taught us at home. I remember vividly her reading Hiawatha to us. In 1876 great fortune came to me in that my father and mother decided to take me to the Philadelphia Centennial with them. As I stood in Philadelphia, at the age of eight, before the great Corliss engine, which drove all the machinery used in the exposition, I became at once an engineer. Also, I heard the talk about the Bell telephone being exhibited there. At any rate, when we returned to Maquoketa we boys rigged up a tin-can telephone system between our house and the neighbours. Taking two cans, we knocked the bottom out of each and stretched paper tightly over the opening, forming a diaphragm. The telephone wire was a string attached at both ends to the middles of the diaphragms. Thus, keeping the string taut and talking into the open ends of the cans, we telephoned between our houses 100 yards or more apart.

That fall I was sent for the first time to the ward school, where within three months I had my second very bothersome lesson in moral philosophy—one which disturbed my peace of mind for months or even years. Whispering to our neighbours was forbidden. One day when the noise became unbearable the teacher began at the other end of the row of seats, which terminated with my own, and asked each boy if he had whispered that day. Not one of them had ever thought of such a thing, and as each boy made his denial and as the teacher’s accusing finger came down the row toward me I found myself madly searching for my formula. When the blow struck my seat I had found it and said No, for of course I had not whispered even if I had talked out loud a little, as I said to myself. I lost more sleep over that crime than any other I ever committed. It came back to torment my soul through all my childhood. Nothing else of educational significance stands out so vividly in memory in pre-high-school days, unless it be the fact that from the age of ten or eleven I always had some young lady in my grade in school whom I distantly adored. My fancies, however, were always monogamous; they never tolerated more than one at a time. But the passing years brought changes.

In the high school I had some stimulating teachers, one a man, Dan Priaulx by name, largely self-educated, who kept his algebra class competing hard with one another in solving problems. He had not learned that competition was harmful. Why? Because he had lived and observed and reflected, and was in fact a born thinker and educator. He would send us all to the board at once, give us a problem and then say, I’ll buy two quarts of peanuts for the pupil who gets the right answer first. Then he would take the sixteen of us down to the store, in school hours, too, and buy the winner his very big bag of peanuts. Of course they were passed around. Once on a final examination he came into the room and said, "It isn’t fair always to make me give you examinations. You write out the examination questions on this course." Each one of us did just that, and he marked us on how well we covered the subject in our questions. Again, he made us commit to memory every week some familiar quotation for recitation to the school on Friday afternoon. I thus stored my mind with a goodly number of bits of classic literature, which I have found useful all my life. I am sorry that this custom is not as highly regarded now as formerly. One may not understand the quotation when he learns it, but the significance of it will come to him in later life, and he will thank the parent or teacher who wove it into his young being.

In the field of science the Maquoketa High School made a pathetic showing. Indeed, I had practically no science at all in my high-school course, and I think high-school science instruction throughout the country was at that time in general very poor.

The principal of the high school, who was also the teacher of physics, was in the habit of spending his summers locating wells with the aid of the water witch, a forked hazel stick which was supposed to turn down in a particular way when it was brought over a locality in which it would be useful to sink a well. This same teacher, who taught without the assistance of laboratory work though he occasionally made a classroom demonstration for us, protested vigorously, for the following reason, against the textbook’s assertion that sound was a vibratory mode of motion of the air. He asked the class how far we could hear a katydid. When we ventured to reply, A half-mile, he got us to compute the weight of a hemisphere of air half a mile in radius—the project method was already hoary with age—and then triumphantly asked the class how many of us were foolish enough to believe that a katydid could set into motion half a ton of air with a mere kick from its tiny hind leg. Such an assertion, he declared, would be sheer nonsense, so that we would have to find some better explanation of sound than the textbook provided. Those who glory in the development of the critical attitude without too much concern about the soundness of the criticism (and