James Ernest Smith (1881–1973) was the founder of the National Radio Institute in Washington D.C., which trained 1.5 million students through home study over its 88-year history. Smith was born on February 3, 1881, in Rochester, New Hampshire. He held a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering (B.S.E.E., 1906) from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) and began his career at Westinghouse Electric Corporation in Pittsburgh, but he took an extended leave of absence to teach what remained in the term of an applied electricity course at McKinley Manual Training School (moved in 1926 to its present location in Washington, D.C., and now known as McKinley Technology High School) for a colleague who had become ill. It went well and Smith was offered a permanent position at the school, which he