electrical and communications engineers.49 An increasingly reclusive figure, who, as Wiener put it, "was born poor, lived poor, and died poor," Heaviside had lacked powerful allies in academia and the Post Office. In Wiener's view this made him "sincere, courageous, and incorruptible." He had devoted himself to a problem of attenuation that plagued long telegraph lines, insisting against orthodoxy that they should be "loaded" with inductance coils at regular intervals. In correspondence he had dubbed this idea "heavification," a term that both expressed the principle and encapsulated "just credit to its inventor." But the Post Office-with a monopoly on telegraphy-had denied him experimental facilities and, in Heaviside's view, attempted to suppress his papers. He had responded by denouncing scientific secrecy as "one of the most criminal acts such a man could be guilty of," and had refused to patent his contributions.50 Pupin had then become the first to mount a real test, announcing his success to the AIEE and securing his own patent on the technique, defeating a rival researcher from AT&T to do so (with the company's connivance, Wiener thought). AT&T then bought Pupin's now-robust patent for a rumored $5oo,ooo. The suddenly rich Pupin had given scant credit to Heaviside, preferring to credit his own childhood experiences with Serbian shepherds (who apparently communicated by banging knives stuck into the ground). His autobiography became a best seller, helping to legitimate the image of the industrial scientist. Meanwhile the loading-coil technique became the basis of the entire long-distance network, and hence of the culture of research that Pupin so served. This in turn had led to Wiener's own early research foci, because AT&T wanted to add "repeaters" (amplifiers employing a negative feedback technique) at points along the lines and find a way to transmit several signals at once.51 The possibility rested on the "wired wireless" concept for which Lee and Wiener had intended to sell AT&T their own circuit. To make matters worse, just as Wiener and Lee were in the midst of their frustrating patent experience, Pupin publicly hailed AT&T as the harbinger of a future utopia "more just and generous to the worker than any which the world has ever seen." "One of the great services which the telephone has rendered to this nation," he maintained, "is its demonstration that an industrial monopoly, wisely administered, can be a national blessing." A perpetuation of small science would only have "paralyzed progress." In demonizing Pupin, therefore, Wiener was not attacking a figure from the past, but one who personified the current glorification of intellectual property.52
Wiener believed that this piece of piracy had been a turning point in the history of communications science-and of science in general. By 1930 at the latest he was convinced of the need to vindicate Heaviside against his "plagiator." He worked to track down papers in Britain and urged the project on a journalist so passionately that he recoiled.53 Ten years later, amid his intense work on antiaircraft systems (he took Benzedrine to keep going), Wiener made the time to write Orson Welles a long letter urging the director of Citizen Kane to make his next film about the Pupin affair. It would address the "feral" period of modern industrial science, he said, and its origin in piracy and soul selling. He added that Appleton, that advocate of science communication, had pulped Heaviside's authorized work, only for "at least three pirated editions" to follow, "one in China," and for them to become canonical 54 Welles is not known to have replied, but Wiener did not relinquish the idea. In Invention he remarked that Pupin's autobiography was in reality "a cry from Hell." The Tempter then took this conceit to its limit. In his own terms, the novel merged Prometheus with Faust. Heaviside, obviously, was Prometheus. Pupin was the ambitious but shallow scholar who sold his soul to a monopolist Mephistopheles. And the patent systemwas the mechanism- the cosmos, as it were-