MICHAEL PUPIN 



mental character of the vioHn an almost infinite va- 

 riety of modulations. 



Kreisler makes the vibrating strings speak a lan- 

 guage which is indeed a message from heaven. When 

 Kreisler plays a Beethoven sonata he is the apostle of 

 the great composer and delivers his master's message. 

 The message is the embodiment of an inspiration, the 

 cradle of which is the soul of the heaven-born genius. 



Such a message is a message from divinity, and it 

 recalls to my memory the vesper-bell of my native vil- 

 lage and my mother's words, "Michael, do you not 

 hear God's message which calls you to his altar to 

 praise his everlasting glory?" 



This is the answer which science gives me to the 

 question: What is sound? 



What is light? 



This is indeed a momentous question. The sun- 

 worship among the ancients testifies that even without 

 a trace of the scientific knowledge which we possess 

 to-day, the ancients knew intuitively the function of 

 sunlight in all organic life. They knew that without 

 this source of life-giving radiation our terrestrial 

 globe would be a cold and dreary desert. 



The greatest glory of science of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury is the discovery that light is an electromagnetic 

 phenomenon. To Faraday and to Maxwell and to 

 their native land, the British Isles, belongs that glory. 

 What is the meaning of this wonderful discovery? It 

 is very simple; indeed, it is simplicity itself. A ray of 

 light from our sun or from any hot and luminous body 

 is a swarm of an enormous, practically infinite, num- 

 ber of tiny electrical dots and dashes speeding along 



