J. V. N. Dorr, the Man G. H. DORR
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me. It suddenly occurred to me that this sort of attitude on my part wasn’t exactly one to be proud of. Why not be friends? And we became friends then and there for the rest of our lives.
HE task of Dr. Whitaker, who preceded me, and of your medalist who follows me, is not too difficult. One has spoken about the tangible expression of a man’s life in terms of scientific accomplishment-about, so to speak, his working clothes. The other proposes to talk abstractionsabout an engineer’s place in the tough spot in which the world finds itself today. And of course abstractions are easy enough to talk about. But I am supposed to penetrate behind this muddy veil of classifiers and thickeners and agitators that has been draped about the medalist by the first speaker, and say something about the human being, if indeed there be one, inside. And what is a human being? Surely it is not that curious abstraction or envelope of noteworthy accomplishment that exists for those who have known of but not come into personal contact with a man who has done something out of the ordinary. And even when we do come in casual contact with such a man, do we not bring to an inspection of him an apparel woven of our own imagination with which we so immediately clothe him that we never do see the real man in his naked proportions? “There is a majesty that doth hedge about a king.’’ Perhaps. But most of the time isn’t that majesty but this cloak of our imagination evoked by the abstraction of position or power? And we never see what may be but a scarecrow within. And even when back of this extraordinary accomplishment or back of this exalted position there is a real runof-mine man, how are we t o peel off these wrappings to see what he is really like? And why attempt to do so? Why not leave our conception of our medalist as an endlessly oscillating rake? Or as an endlessly operating clarifier decanting with cyclical deliberation the clear liquor of truth from the precipitating slime of error? With the tinkle of the bell of his overload alarm when the forces of Satan are getting too much for him! No king is a hero to his valet. RIust we say the same of a Perkin medalist to his brother? Must familiarity always breed contempt? Family memories go back t o a thin, hungrylooking boy, always managing in some way or other to get in bad with his grandmother-no signs of greatness then, other than being slightly dyspeptic. And of course there is the warping effect of certain family grudges. When as an infant I was first displayed by my mother to the medalist and he was asked if he didn’t like having a little brother, he gave the somewhat Scotch answer, “I would rather have a saucer of oatmeal.” How could a younger brother so appraised forget it, and fail t o regard this as a convenient opportunity to get even? And yet there is and always has been something disarming about the medalist, as all his associates will agree, even when he is most maddening. Perhaps it is a fundamental patience and large heartedness about him that has this effect. I remember well as a small boy, with the spirit of 1776 in me rebelling against the very thought of his being five years older than I and the implication of authority over me that it carried. And in the recollection of resulting combats I can still feel the wrath expressed by my flailing kicks a t his shins and, on the other hand, the dispassionate, firm grip in which he held me. In the end we made friends. I remember that too. I had been ill in camp and had been scornfully gloating over the somewhat menial character of the attendance he had given
IT WAS then that I first began to observe some of the tendencies and characteristics which have brought him here tonight. In those days of our boyhood there was an awakening interest in what we called the natural sciences. The Swiss Louis Agassiz a t Harvard had become something of a national hero. Our mother organized an Agassiz club among the youngsters of the community. It debated with a seriousness and partisanship now quite unbelievable, the questions: Which is the more intelligent insect, the ant or the bee? R’hich is the more useful material, wood or iron? But with John, interest in the club, and in Nature with a capital letter, took a less abstract form. He was a collector for himself and the club. There was a beautiful collection of butterflies and moths, but his main interest was in minerals. I tagged along, as I have been doing ever since, with a complete obliviousness to the technical. I remember the exploration of a new world when we went specimen hunting in the extensive but abandoned workings of a copper mine, important in Revolutionary days, located on the edge of the Jersey meadows about six miles from where we are meeting tonight. And then our dumping the heaviest specimens with a splash into the oily Passaic River after lugging them two miles but with still a hot and dusty five miles to hoof it on our way home. It was in the days when boys moved under their own power. I wasn’t old enough to go on the longer tramps (not “hikes” in those days) which John used to take up t o the northern New Jersey iron and zinc mines, sleeping in barns and haystacks and returning thinner than ever, with boots showing signs of the road but with additions t o the collection. (Some of them are now, I believe, a t his Westport Mill.) The same general slant took him into chemistry a t high school. Then to the great excitement of the family, John went off one day a t sixteen t o work in Edison’s laboratory. And i t was to work. Off on his star bicycle a t 7:30 in the morning, lunch in his pocket. Back to dinner and then back for the evening’s work a t the lab and home usually long after the rest of us had gone to bed. Great excitement in the family a t one time when the lab swallowed him up for four days during the crisis of an experiment. This molding of the young research worker to the habits of work-such a far cry from the present standards of the Wage and Hour Law-left a permanent impress. Ability t o work indefinitely on four or five hours’ sleep and an instinct for starting a session for the concentrated consideration of some problem a t some odd hour of the day or night is one of those maddening characteristics for which his associates are at times inclined to curse his early association with Edison. There is another such characteristic-an almost unfailing hospitality to any new idea and an extraordinary fertility in suggesting in broad outline widely varying experimentations for possible ways of carrying it out, many of which from the very nature of the case are bound to prove abortive. I remember being admitted to the sacred precinct of the Edison laboratory only twice. Of the first visit nothing remains in memory but the stenches of the chemical laboratory and a frowsy-looking Polish professor, John’s immediate boss. The second time was a Sunday afternoon when a great tiger 366
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skin on the library floor and our group of earnest young Christians singing hymns to be recorded and rendered back to us on the then developing phonograph were almost equally astonishing. My small-boy net impression of research and invention from the older brother’s experience a t the lab was that experiments were in ordinary course doomed to failure, but that if enough things were tried by an inventor on the doctrine of chance, he would perhaps hit on something which would work. I don’t know that that Philistine impression has been wholly eradicated by subsequent observation. I n the following years in college and in the summers between, the impression your medalist made on me was that he could swim under water an extraordinarily long time, would rouse a camp unnecessarily early to go fishing, and had a DORRCONTINUOUS RECAUSTICIZIXG SYSTEM AT HOLLINGSWORTH & WHITNEY PAPER sense of humor in certain direcCOMPANY’S 200-TON SULFATE MILLAT MOBILE,ALA. tions that often led to the family Soda, used in the digestion liquors, is recovered, recausticized, and used again admonition, “Now, John, don’t for digestion of new pulpurood. try to be as funny as you can.” So little does one know-we would rather have thought then that his best bid for fame might be as a follower of Artemus Ward ingenuity to be helpful in the lives of those about him, young or Mark Twain. or old, rich or poor. These are personal matters. Then came his return to laboratory work for Pete Austin The prime characteristic of his professional and business in Brooklyn and his early Black Hills days. Of the latter I life is his perfectionism. Every angle must be explored, every have a distinct impression from visits to the mining camp, consideration accurately weighed, the engineering must be memorable t o me, in 1893 and 1898, both before the initiation perfect. All must be put on paper. You think I am deof the particular work which brings him here. Yet I cannot scribing a virtue, but after all, every vice is but a virtue but think that those hard mining camp years developed an gone wrong. To his associates this perfectionism seems a t initiative, an individuality, and an instinct for human relatimes to cross the line to vice. Due to this quality it is sometionship that have contributed to everything he has done times a tough job to get him to make decisions, for data are since. often necessarily incomplete. Intangibles are difficult to As a side issue in those days he was a lay reader for a weigh. In a recipe for wisdom, must there not be play for ranching parson. The high light in that career was when your judgment in determining the ingredients? medalist once forgot to check before the service he was to Another characteristic of the medalist is his willingness to conduct just where the first lesson for that Sunday was and listen to criticism. He doesn’t enjoy it; indeed, a t times it opened the Bible a t random and began to read. As an ironic seems almost physically painful to him. But he gets it from fate would have it, he had opened a t a chapter in Leviticus his associates with frankness and in full measure, and he abdealing in detail with the very personal habits of the Israelites sorbs it. Only now and then will the worm turn and make his and the law applicable thereto. As he read on he got in deeper tormentors feel like thirty cents. and deeper. Even agile skipping couldn’t save the situation. He has a geqius for attracting and inspiring younger men Then with a resourcefulness that has served him well in other and holding them in his organization. That is the way he fields, he stopped a t a critical semicolon and closed the Bible has built up his staff the world over. That staff, he will tell with a solemn “So endeth the first lesson”. you, is the achievement he really takes most pride in. Yet his* The ten years during which your medalist was initiatperfectionism again a t times prevents his taking the satisfacing the fundamental inventions which have been described tion he is entitled to in it; he is always looking for miracles to to you, I saw least of him. They were touch-and-go make it better. This is good for the staff but tough on him. years of the hardest kind of work, in which necessity was Like most of us, he seems a t times t o be turned away from literally the mother of invention. But of the last thirty the things he does best, to spend effort on things somewhat years I can speak from the closest of personal and profesout of his line and which he does less well. But I suppose sional associations. everyone is entitled to a frolic of his own a t times. The thing that attracts and holds men t o your medalist is his imagination, as i t roves over the face of the globe and the WHAT are the things about him that stand out in these fields of scientific endeavor. If a t times that imagination years? I won’t speak of his ability to take grievous punishseems to his associates a bit unbridled, they also are constantly ment in his personal life, not merely without flinching and with the patience of Job, but with sweetness and unimpaired becoming aware of the long range results of his vision. It faith in life. Nor will I speak of his incessant desire and makes professional life with him exciting, worth living.
