ROBERT W. WOOD

American small boys love to invent and make things — gadgets, smells, kites, explosions, slingshots, little engines, and bean shooters. They also love to play outrageous pranks.

The essence of Robert Williams Wood is that he is a super endowed American small boy — who has never grown up. The same was true of Mark Twain both as a person and as projected in the personalities of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. The part played by environment in the development of these two American small boys (one living and one dead) who stand and will continue to stand as giants in their totally different fields runs curiously parallel. Both were supplied by fate, to test their wits and strength in early childhood, with mighty and gigantic “toys”.

In Mark Twain’s case, it was the rolling Mississippi with its rafts, floods, and steamboats, runaway slaves, robbers’ caves… you know…

In Robert Wood’s case, it was the roaring, giant Sturtevant Blower Works with its power plant, hydraulic rams, chemical vats, blast furnaces, engines, tools, and machinery, which you shall presently see.

I know Robert Wood pretty well by now, having worked and played with him for a long time, and I hope I can succeed in showing him to you as he really is. There is something fantastic, Gargantuan, Promethean about the man, but to this very day, with Wood in his early, active, robust seventies, there lurks grinning and leaps out continually from behind that fiery curtain of fantasy and scientific genius, the American small boy’s dream of himself — the American small boy who has become a great man yet has never grown up.

I keep repeating American because this Wood of mine is as American as a hickory tree. America is in the roots of him. The brightest little French or Greek boy wouldn’t have the remotest idea what he’s all about — any more than they can really understand Huck Finn. And he’s often shocked his little British cousins, though they’ve showered him with all their highest honors. No little land, indeed no other land on earth, could have produced this man.

William Seabrook

Rhinebeck, 1941

There is a family legend that Robert Williams Wood wrote a letter to his grandmother on the day he was born. The letter in question is extant. I have read, handled, and examined it. It is dated Concord, May 2, 1868. Its obsolete paper, faded, rusty ink, et cetera, all prove the authenticity — at least — of its date. It reads:

From the autumn of 1887 until his graduation from Harvard in 1891, young Robert was a difficult problem to most of the faculty with whom he came in contact and conflict. In some studies he was disturbingly brilliant and original; in others he was so indifferent that he narrowly escaped flunking them. It would have been the same in any university. When I asked him how he’d happened to choose Harvard, he said, “Father chose!”

He had entered with the maximum number of conditions. He removed them by taking one or two extra courses each year, but remained a poor student to the end from the viewpoint of those among the academic pundits who discouraged originality — and these were still in the strong majority. By that time, however, Harvard, in response to President Eliot’s advocacy of the elective system, had got away from the hard and fast curriculum which forced every student to take a set variety of subjects, mostly classical. Wood was allowed a considerable choice of subjects. These were largely scientific. He specialized in chemistry and would probably have continued in it throughout his life, with his poltergeist-Promethean penchant for fires and explosions… if the water closet in a certain later — and supposedly select — boarding-house in Leipzig hadn’t opened directly on the dining-room….

While chemistry was his serious concern at Harvard, his hobby was geology, and the great Professor Shaler said one day to his father, “It’s spoiling a good geologist to make a poor chemist.” Despite the glacier episode and other wrangles, Shaler remained his best friend on the faculty. Wood admired him deeply, and my guess is that Shaler had a profound influence in shaping the character — and some of the idiosyncrasies — of the future professor of physics. Shaler was a classroom P. T. Barnum, who delighted in dragging in the cherry-colored cats and elephants. As Wood vividly remembers him, he was a red-bearded, long-legged Kentuckian, noted for what the students called “the geological stride,” which kept classes at a dogtrot as they followed him on expeditions to the rock-bound coast of Massachusetts or to various inland quarries which they visited. Shaler gave the most popular course in college, designated NH-4 in the catalogue. Its popularity lay partly in the legend that it was a “snap,” but there was also an aura about his lecture room which delighted the more intelligent of the students. He was spectacular on occasion to a degree seldom equaled on any stage in the heyday of high vaudeville, and often given to forensic hyperbole. One of Shaler’s fantastic flights so intrigued young Wood that after close to fifty years he can still quote it verbatim. It has never appeared in print, and he begged me to include it.

The geologist had been lecturing one day on the gradual development of life on earth; nature’s provision of terrifying fertility to insure a species against extinction; the necessity of avoiding overcrowding by the introduction of mass massacre of certain lower forms of life, to supplement nature’s own massacres in which species higher up in the evolutionary scale devoured the surplus. Said he by way of peroration:

“The female aphis or common plant louse, gentlemen, produces in a single summer three thousand eggs — gentlemen! — and I have made a calculation that if all the progeny had lived since the first appearance of the Aphididae on earth, we should now have a cylinder of plant lice equaling in diameter that of the earth’s orbit around the sun, and projecting itself into space with a velocity greater than that of light!”

Though our young student was lost in admiration for Shaler’s style and vigor, he frequently precipitated violent arguments concerning Shaler’s theories and facts. Shaler had a fantastic notion all his own that the earth, long ages ago, had itself spawned the meteors and meteorites which now from time to time come crashing back to us. The astronomical theory, of course, is that they are broken fragments of comets, moving in orbits like asteroids, and that when in the course of their wandering they get entangled with the earth’s gravitation, they plunge into our atmosphere, become red hot, and fall to earth in the Siberian forest or in Old Man Jones’s cow pasture.

In a lecture one day, Shaler said, “I feel sure it is more reasonable to regard meteorites as volcanic bombs, ejected from great craters erupting here on earth when the earth was younger and more vigorous. These masses of lava were ejected at such velocity that while they were unable to escape completely from the earth’s attraction, they were projected in orbits of enormous eccentricity, and instead of falling back immediately, return to our planet only after the lapse of millions of years….”

Young Wood, only a sophomore and a surpassingly intransigeant one at that, had been an “astronomer” since the age of ten. He drew Shaler’s attention, after the lecture, to the fact that a velocity of over seven miles a second would be necessary, or fifteen times the velocity of a rifle shell.

Shaler was tolerant, as truly great men are, even in their intolerance, and he and Wood had a long argument about it, but the young student, of course, was unable to shake his conviction in the least. Not even the old Sturtevant plant with its giant machinery could yield any convincing experiment on that.

Professor Jackson of the Chemistry Department was a horse of another color than Shaler. He was one of those “horses of instruction” whom William Blake had in mind when he wrote that the tigers of wrath were wiser. He discouraged original experiment by undergraduates and particularly frowned on impromptu research work in the laboratory.

Wood had read about the compound of iodine and nitrogen which is formed by pouring ammonia upon iodine crystals and allowing them to dry on blotting paper. This compound is a very dangerous explosive, quite harmless when wet, but detonating with a loud explosion upon the touch of a feather when dry. Even a fly lighting upon the powder may cause its detonation. The method of preparing it was so simple that he couldn’t resist the temptation to try it in the laboratory, where he was supposed to busy himself only with qualitative analysis.

Iodine crystals were on the supply shelf and ammonia was on every student’s desk. It was the work of a few minutes to prepare the explosive compound. Having developed a slight bump of caution from earlier experiments in his boyhood in the manufacture of fireworks and explosive substances for celebrating the Fourth of July, he divided the half-teaspoonful or so of the dangerous substance into quite a number of small heaps on a sheet of blotting paper to avoid the danger of having the whole mass go off at once. One of the smaller heaps appearing to have dried, Wood touched it with a lead pencil. A crack like the report of a pistol resulted and a light cloud of violet smoke floated away from the scene of the explosion. All of the other piles had been scattered without exploding, as they were still in the wet condition. Professor Jackson walked up to his desk and said, “What was that, Mr. Wood?”

“Tri-iodide of nitrogen,” meekly answered the embarrassed young student.

“Please confine yourself to the experiment of the afternoon and do not let similar disturbances occur again,” said the Professor, coldly.

“No, sir,” replied Wood. Jackson turned away and walked down the laboratory. Presently there was another resounding crack as one of the students stepped on some of the material which had blown off on the floor and dried, and for the rest of the afternoon there were numerous scattered explosions from the scattered particles of tri-iodide. Later Wood discovered that a little of the material laid along the top of the back fence caused surprise to prowling cats.

In those great dawning days of increased academic independence, another member of the faculty at Harvard who did not discourage daring and originality was the immortal William James. Wood took his course in psychology, and carried into that field also a violent curiosity and a tendency toward independent research. One of the requirements in James’s course was that each student should write a thesis on some chosen subject. Wood, who disliked rhetorical and dialectic writing and who had barely passed in his course in English composition, cast about for a way to avoid the necessity. It so happened that James at the time was conducting his celebrated “American Census on Hallucinations” and was being swamped with returns to the questionnaires with which he had flooded the country by mail. The census was designed to throw light on what percentage of people “had visions,” “heard voices,” had premonitions which came true or other unusual psychic experiences. More than fifteen hundred answers had already come in, and he was staggered by the accumulating mass of material which piled up awaiting inspection and analysis. Young Wood was offered — or wangled — the job of collating this instead of doing his thesis. Despite the hard work involved, this was peaches and cream for Wood, who is congenitally possessed with a violent and inordinate curiosity.

This was in Wood’s sophomore year, 1888. A good proportion of the hallucinatory responses, of course, were from religious fanatics, while a scattering few were from “dopes.” He has remembered all these years a rather sweet one that came from a dear old lady in Pennsylvania.

The legend that our Promethean poltergeist spat fire and crepitated flames when fate later made him a full professor — as did the unhappy bear beyond the mountain — is not untrue but garbled. The error is merely one of chronology and is readily understandable, since Wood regarded most professors as purple cows and might well have been upset when he became one.

Time embalmed the error when it wrote him up a couple of years ago, and there appeared in print another chronological mix-up concerning the period when he set fire to the boardinghouse hash. Both these Pantagruelian episodes occurred actually while he was still a student, doing postgraduate work at Johns Hopkins. He’s done even more outrageous things in his full professorial maturity, but it’s only fair to keep the record straight.

In the autumn of 1891, after his graduation from Harvard, he went to Johns Hopkins with the idea of taking a Ph. D. in chemistry, working principally with Professor Ira Remsen. The first thing he did was to find a boarding-house to live in — and the next thing he did was to set the hash on fire. There had long been in that college boarding-house an up — to — then unverifiable suspicion that the breakfast hash was made from scraps scraped from the boarders’ dinner plates the night before. It was a plausible suspicion because morning hash always followed on the heels of steak the night before. But how to prove it? Wood scratched his ear and said, “I think I can prove it… with a Bunsen burner and a spectroscope.” He knew that lithium chloride was a harmless substance which happened to resemble common salt, both in appearance and taste. He knew also that the spectroscope was capable of detecting the minutest traces of lithium in any material burned in a blue flame. Thus treated, it would show a crimson line. So the fiendish plot was hatched against the landlady, and when next they dined on beefsteak, Rob left some large and tempting scraps on his plate, liberally sprinkled with lithium chloride. Fragments of next morning’s hash were pocketed, carried to the laboratory, and cremated before the slit of the spectroscope. The telltale crimson lithium line appeared, faint but unmistakable. The story followed Wood throughout his whole career, and now has a number of international variants. One piece of embroidery places the episode in a German pension to which a distinguished American professor of chemistry was refused admission — because Wood and his lithium had been there first.

The fire-spitting episode occurred one day after a January thaw, as Wood was on his way back from the laboratory to that same boarding-house. The shortest route for the students was through a Negro section which had a grocery store where colored crowds collected every day at noon to sun themselves on the sidewalk. The street just then was flooded with water from curb to curb. Wood had learned that sodium, a soft, silvery metal, when thrown into water, will take fire spontaneously with a loud explosion and burn with a fierce, baleful yellow flame, emitting showers of sparks and clouds of white smoke. The next time he and his fellow-boarders were starting home for lunch, he carried in his pocket, in a small tin box, a ball of sodium about the size of a large marble. The big puddle spread in the street, and the Negroes were assembled as usual, sitting on boxes and old chairs in front of the grocery store. As Wood passed, he cleared his throat loudly and spat ostentatiously into the puddle, at the same time flipping the sodium ball, unnoticed, in the same direction. There was a terrific bang as they strode on, sparks flew, and a great flash of yellow fire blazed on the surface of the water. Behind them pandemonium broke loose — howls, prayers, overturned chairs, and one voice louder than all the rest:

“Out o’ my way, niggers! Dat man spit dat fire! He look young — but only de ole Devil, ole Satan hisself, can do dat!” Wood says this was his first successful “experiment” with the element which afterward, through experiments of a soberer nature, contributed to his world-wide fame.

A. B. Porter, a graduate student in physics, with whom he had formed a partnership in the perpetration of harmless diversions, collaborated with him in the construction of a giant megaphone, a cone of stiff cardboard nine feet long and about two feet in diameter at the larger end. (Megaphones of this type, only much smaller, were not offered for sale to the general public until four or five years later). With this they could project speech to an astonishing distance, addressing embarrassing remarks to people two or three blocks away. With a horn of this description one can speak without raising the voice, and the person addressed gets the impression that the speaker is very close to him. Being thus quite safe from detection, they would sit in Wood’s room on the top floor of the boardinghouse on McCulloh Street and watch for a promising victim. Once they caught sight of a roundsman twirling his night stick and talking to a girl under a corner gas lamp two blocks up the street. Resting the mouth of the great horn on the window sill and pointing it towards the philandering officer, they reminded him in a gentle voice that “All policemen have big feet.” To a person walking away from them at the end of the block, with no one else in sight, they would say, “I beg your pardon, but you’ve dropped something.” He would stop, look behind him, then down at his feet, then up at the windows above, and after meditating for a moment, move along.

During this year of hell-raising at Hopkins, Wood was conducting a transcontinental correspondence, viva voce, with the girl who later had the courage and audacity to take him on for life. He did this by means of wax phonograph cylinders which they mailed to and fro in old Royal baking-powder cans. He had rented two Edison recording mechanisms (you couldn’t buy them in those days) and had taught her to operate one of them. She lived in San Francisco. A priest lived in the room next to his in the boarding-house in Baltimore, and the walls between the rooms were thin. He used to cover his head and the machine with quilts to muffle the ardent words destined solely for the ears of his inamorata.

He had first met Miss Gertrude Ames when he was a sophomore at Harvard. She was a girl out of the Golden West, but of pure New England stock like his own. She had lived in California since her early childhood, but she was born in Boston, daughter of Pelham W. Ames, who was a grandson of Fisher Ames, first Congressman from Massachusetts during Washington’s administration. Her maternal grandmother was a sister of Wood’s father, so that she was a cousin, once removed. She had come East that winter to visit relatives in Boston and Cambridge. It was her first experience with snow and sub-zero weather. Robert took her tobogganing and sleigh riding. He began his courtship with a bottle of sulphuric acid! “The Courtship of a Coming Chemist” would be a happy title for the episode if it weren’t for his absurd antipathy for the Miles Standish word. Here’s what I found among his own notes covering that period.

There turned out to be only one water closet in the Leipzig pension where Wood, wife, and babies were to live while he studied chemistry with Ostwald. Moreover, it opened directly off the dining-room! Robert says his father “chose” Harvard for him, and there’s a story that it was Mrs. Wood, influenced by this open plumbing openly arrived at, who “chose” to go on to Berlin.

My own impression is that nobody ever successfully “chose” anything for Wood unless it chanced to coincide with his own choice. Anyhow, wife, babies, bags and baggage, they went to Berlin.

What seems to have first struck and stimulated Robert’s best — or worst — instincts in the German capital was the abundance of signs, placards, and police injunctions indicating that many trivial personal actions, free in democratic countries, were here either forbidden or state controlled. He had known, of course, about the Verboten placards, but not about the Strengsten untersagt ones. They translate literally “strengthily undersaid”, and while Robert insists they merely amused him, I suspect they had the same effect a red flag is supposed to have on the proverbial bull.

The first one he saw was over the window of his compartment in a railway coach, framed under glass in a neat oval bronze frame. It read:

Young Frank Willard, better known by the pen name of Josiah Flynt, under which he had done hobo articles for the Century and Harper's, had a newspaper commission in the early summer of 1896 to write articles on the Pan-Russian Exposition and Fair at Nizhni Novgorod, and on the Trans- Siberian Railway, then in process of construction. He thought it would be nice if Rob accompanied him. Rob thought so too, but the expense, in terms of transportation alone, if it had to come out of his own pocket would be (as the Scotch say) damnable.

Josiah Francis Temperance Union Willard Flynt had six more drinks, one for each of his names and pseudonyms, and concocted a Machiavellian scheme. For himself, he had already managed to wangle a personal letter from Prince Hilkorff of the Russian Ministry of Railways, giving him limitless first- class transportation and directing all railway officials to favor him in every possible way. His proposal was that Rob become the self-appointed correspondent of an imaginary American newspaper and obtain a similar free joy ride over the longest new railroad on earth. Wood’s New England conscience couldn’t quite be stretched to the point of inventing an imaginary newspaper — but he recalled that he’d once written a couple of pieces for the San Francisco Examiner. So he closed his eyes while Willard had some handsome cards printed, and salved his conscience by deciding that he actually would do some articles for the Examiner and supply copies to the Russian authorities in honest return for the transportation[4]. All necessary passes, documents, and visas were obtained.

And then it turned out that Rob was also to help in a spot of amateur smuggling! It seemed that Willard had previously visited Count Tolstoy, and had promised, at the great man’s piteous request, to smuggle in for him a dozen or so of his works which had been published in Berlin but were banned in Russia. Tolstoy had never seen them in type. It was a serious offense, even for a foreigner, to smuggle them in.

The books were duly purchased and hidden in the luggage, and as they approached the Russian frontier, the two conspirators tied the thick, paper-bound volumes beneath their coats, like life preservers, around their chests and middles, with heavy twine. There was an awful moment at the customhouse when police guards in full uniform, with long sabers hanging from their belts, came down the line “frisking” everyone by vigorous slaps. By the grace of God they were fortunately spared this ordeal, possibly on account of the contrast between their more or less respectable appearance and that of the muzhiks, small merchants, gypsies, and other assorted riffraff who had piled their belongings on the long benches of the customhouse.

On reaching Moscow, they made contact with Chekhov. He was a friend of Willard’s but scarcely known outside Russia at that time. They gave Chekhov the contraband volumes for Tolstoy “in the dark of the moon”, and he subsequently delivered them via the “underground railway”.

For the rest of their trip, I can’t do better than hand Wood the microphone. He tells it well.

Willard had some business with the American Consul in Moscow, and before starting for Siberia we went to see him. We found him in an old dark, dirty office on a second floor, sitting at a roll-top desk over which hung his framed credentials, ornamented with a screaming American eagle and covered with flyspecks. He was apparently Teutonic and could neither speak nor understand English. How he communicated with Washington, if he ever did, was a mystery. Willard had a letter from our Ambassador in Berlin to the Ambassador in St. Petersburg, and hoped for an opportunity to have a word or two with Czar Nicholas. What we got, in deep, guttural disapproval, was:

“Who are you, that you should ask to see THE — GREAT — WHITE — CZAR!”

It was a purely rhetorical question, and we did not press the point. I spent most of my time lugging my forty pounds of camera, tripod, and dry plates around — occasionally also making water-color sketches, frequently pestered by formidable gendarmes. When they were too suspicious or belligerent, I displayed Prince Hilkorff’s letter. We went to St. Petersburg first, and then to Moscow.

From Moscow to Nizhni Novgorod and the Fair was a night’s trip. As we had unlimited transportation free, we spent a week shuttling back and forth between the two cities, saving hotel bills by sleeping on the night express, the Kourierski. The first-class compartment for two had a single wide seat extending from the window to the wall of the narrow corridor. By raising the back, which was hinged to the wall, and then fastening two bolts, we had an excellent upper and lower berth.

We finally got off for Siberia on the Moscow night express to Chelyabinsk, just beyond the Ural mountains, where the then new trans-Siberian line started. We got along well and economically living on trains in Russia. We had our teapots and blankets and were able to buy food at a cost of about half a ruble (twenty-five cents) a day. We lived chiefly on fruit and “meat balls” as we called them — a hash of meat, chicken, and whatnot, enclosed in dough and fried in deep lard. One of them made a meal, and they cost only about five cents apiece, hot from the pot at every railway station. With plenty of fruit, it made a not too badly balanced diet, and we thrived on it. Also, across the tracks, at every railroad station, there was a huge brass samovar, the size of a barrel. At each stop it was charged upon by a crowd of men and women armed with teapots. Hot water was free, and there was always a “free for all” around the samovar. Willard and I formed a “De Land wedge” (football in the nineties), with the help of two or three men we’d met on the train, and went through the crowd like a snowplow through a drift.

At one point in the first stage of the trip, we had an opportunity to leave the train and travel by river for a day or so — on the Volga between Syzran, as I recall it, and Samara. We steamed all day in the bright sunshine, through a flat country, drawing up late at night against a few boards laid on the bank which served as a wharf. It was pitch dark and the single small oil lantern disclosed a pool of ankle-deep, soft mud beyond the makeshift wharf, through which we waded to the road where vehicles awaited us. They were primitive carts or chariots, with wide and shallow wicker baskets half full of straw swung between the high wheels. We piled in with our legs hanging over the edges, and were off at a gallop with shouting and cracking of whips, across the steppes, in total darkness…

At Chelyabinsk we got aboard a trans-Siberian construction train, and had a compartment in a first-class coach which carried construction engineers. The road wasn’t yet open for passengers. These trains ran at irregular intervals, perhaps one a week, and made only about twenty miles an hour over rails that had been merely spiked to crossties that lay in the sand. The stone ballast hadn’t yet been put down. Most of the stations were merely shanties where the telegraph operator lived. The whole job was going to cost over $175,000,000.

Omsk was the first large town we reached. The train was to remain there four days, and we wanted to live aboard her, but the guards and crew (small blame to them) insisted on locking it up for the period. Forced out, we took a room in the Hotel Moscow, where we had to sleep, with our own blankets, on bare mattresses, since sheets and blankets were not supplied. Russian travelers in those days were in the habit of carrying their own bed linen. The mattress was infested with bugs, and our first night was a horror. We brushed the bugs to the floor, but they kept crawling back. Then we put saucers filled with kerosene under the legs of the bed. Then the bugs climbed the wall to the ceiling and began dive bombing us. Next morning we went down to the station, exhibiting our tortured hides — and the letter from Prince Hilkorff — saying we knew His Highness wouldn’t want protégés of his to be eaten alive and begging permission to sleep in the locked train. They took pity on us, and we spent a delightful three days in Omsk, walking, riding in the “haycart” cabs, and swimming in the Irtish.

Willard was writing for American newspapers, and in one of the old clippings, this paragraph occurs.

Except in simplest transactions, the language was a stumbling block. My vocabulary was painfully limited, and Rob could say nothing at all in Russian. When my words gave out, we resorted to pictures which Rob drew with his clever pencil. They spoke with a greater eloquence than words. After he had drawn what we wanted, I would present the sketch to the person with whom we were dealing, and pointing to it, say, “You can?” The man looked sometimes as if he thought we wanted to sell the sketch and were hoping he’d make a bid on it. But as a general thing we were understood, and got what we wanted.

There were no paved streets in the town and the dust kicked up by the galloping horses and the bouncing wash- basket chariots they drew was terrific. We preferred long drives out over the open fields and prairies. We sang and shouted. We were “American Indians” who knew no better, and nobody cared or stopped us.

A few more days in the creaking, creeping train brought us to Tomsk, where we were sitting at a long table alone in the taproom, drinking vodka, when the door opened suddenly, and looking around we saw a man framed against the darkness of the night. He stared at us for a moment. Then suddenly both he and Willard exclaimed, “Well, I’ll be goddamned!” It was an old friend of Willard’s, a journalist who’d been doing Siberia from the opposite direction. He’d left Vladivostok many weeks before, coming partly by train, as the road was under construction from both terminals, then by horses. He told us the three hundred miles at the eastern end was finished and in operation. We drank vodka until nearly dawn and staggered up to bed. He was gone when we got up next day.

On the whole Willard and I decided that Siberia was not awfully exciting. What we saw of it was mostly flat as a pancake, with miles of watermelon fields often extending to the horizon. How they ate all those melons, I can’t imagine. We used to dig a hole, scoop out the best meat in the center, and throw the carcasses out the window. The train guard caught and stopped us. Section hands were working along the road, and even at only twenty miles an hour, he told us, a big watermelon might knock a man out if it hit him on the head.

The soil seemed good — for raising melons — and land could be bought at fifty cents an acre, but we didn’t invest. The truth is we didn’t care much for Siberia. We probably hadn’t seen enough, but we’d at least seen all we wanted. On the trip back, we found a nice, first-class compartment marked “Ladies”, Since there were no ladies on the train, we moved into it. The amiable conductor made no objection, but when we reached Omsk an “incident” occurred, in which we (and our letter from Prince Hilkorff) were worsted by some gentlemen of the Russian High Command. As soon as our train had stopped, two soldiers began throwing luggage into our ladies’ compartment, regardless of our protests. We began throwing it out of the windows as fast as it came in through the door — and then locked the door. In a few minutes there was a sharp pounding. It was our old friend, the stationmaster who had saved us from being bitten to death by bugs, but now he was accompanied by a miniature army. It consisted of an escort of gendarmes, two petty officers, and two impressive generals in long gray coats with full insignia. The station- master said in German,

“This compartment is for ladies, and you gentlemen must ’raus”.

“But are these generals ladies?” we asked, and refused to vacate.

The captain of gendarmes now stepped forward and said something to us, very politely, in Russian. “What’s he say?” we asked the stationmaster. “He says he would regret profoundly the necessity of putting you under arrest”.

We produced our magic letter from Prince Hilkorff and the Ministry of Railways. The gendarme captain read it, bowed again, and said something, even more politely than before. The stationmaster again obligingly translated. “He says it’s very nice indeed that you have a letter from His Highness — but that you have to ’raus mit”.

After we were out and the generals, who were no ladies either, installed, the stationmaster flipped over the placard, so that it now read “Reserved”. The generals bowed to us, and the stationmaster whispered philosophically, “I am sorry for you — but you see, the Little White Father and Prince

Hilkorff live far away in St. Petersburg, while those two generals live here in Omsk, and I have to live here with them."

* * *

Wood says that he did not see his friend Frank Willard again until some six or seven years later, in America. He was sitting in his laboratory one day, when the telephone rang. His account continues:

“Hello, Bobbie”, said a husky voice. “Who’s speaking?” I replied. “Frank”, said the voice convincingly. “Frank who?” I asked. “Frank”, he repeated. “Doan you know ole Frank’s voice, ole Frank Willard?” “For the love of Mike”, I said, “where are you?” “Here in telephone shentry box, Union Shtation. Say, Bobbie, you got any ’bjection my singin’ lil’ shong?” “No”, I said, “if your door is shut”. Then came, in a wailing voice of despair, pitched in a high key, “All I want is fifty million dollash”. Pause. Then, “Shay, Bobbie, I got interesting fren’ with me — going to bring him up — Joe Dollard, bigges’ safe-cracker ’n bank-robber all time. Scotland Yard after him five years. How I get to you?” I gave him directions and hung up as he commenced again, “Shay, Bobbie, you got any ’bjection my singin’…"

In about fifteen minutes they arrived. Mr. Dollard did not look like the pictures of bank-robbers in Mr. Hoover’s F.B.I. magazine. A man slightly gray, well past middle life, he looked more an old and trusted paying teller in a bank than a bank’s safe-opener. Willard had a bottle, and we all had a “lil’ drink”, as he said, out of three small laboratory beaker glasses. We talked awhile of old times, Mr. Dollard listening respectfully but slightly bored, and then, having business elsewhere, he excused himself in a very dignified manner and departed.

Frank told me that he had come to Baltimore at the request of Mr. Leonor F. Loree, then president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Mr. Loree wanted to employ him, disguised as a tramp, to test the efficiency and loyalty of his railroad detectives; he was to be the house guest of Mr. Loree, but had been on a jag for ten days, and could we take him in for the night as he was broke — while he sobered up for his visit? He talked quite normally, if permitted to sing the opening bar of his “lil’ song” at intervals. This seemed to relieve the strain of pretending sobriety, as a slight cough will relieve a long- endured tickling of the throat in a theater. So I took him along in my car to the house. Gertrude was out. Frank had evidently slept in his clothes and was apparently wearing the perspiration that he was born with, as Gertrude once said of a Spanish lady in Mexico who was entertaining her at tea. So I filled the bathtub full of hot water, and suggested a nice warm soak before dinner. Hearing nothing from him for half an hour, I tried the door, which opened disclosing Bacchus asleep in the tub. I woke him by turning on the cold water.

In the course of half an hour he appeared spick and span and in excellent humor. He began by reciting some of his recent adventures and showed not the slightest sign of his spree. We listened entranced, for he was a brilliant talker. Finally he slumped slightly in his chair and turning to Gertrude said, with a rather silly smile, “Mrs. Wood, would you have ’n’ objection to my singin’ a lil’ song?” “Why, no, Mr. Willard, I’d be delighted to have you”. Then he really relaxed and his voice came out strong and clear like that of a drunken sailor: “All — I — wan’ — is — fifty — million — dollash!” He paused, blinked once or twice, and resumed the conversation where he had left off, as if nothing had occurred.

Gertrude had telephoned for a thick steak and a bottle of Major Grey’s Indian chutney, and dinner was announced. There was a large dish of Hamburg black grapes between the candles on the table, and Willard, refusing all other nourishment, ate them slowly one by one as he talked, until, like the Walrus and Carpenter with the Looking-Glass oysters, he’d eaten every one. After dinner we listened enthralled to the story of his travels in Afghanistan, where he walked over the celebrated Khyber Pass into India. It was two o’clock before we even thought of bed. He passed out of our hands the next day and we never saw him again.

His end was very tragic. He contracted pneumonia in Chicago, locked himself up in a room in a cheap hotel, with a few bottles of self-prescribed “medicine”, and only shouted “No — keep out”, when the maid knocked at the door. He had been dead twenty-four hours when the door was unlocked from the outside.

* * *

In the autumn of 1896, the Woods returned to America with their two children growing out of babyhood and the German Kinderfrau whom they couldn’t bear to leave behind. They spent the winter at his mother’s house in Jamaica Plain, while Robert continued his independent research in the laboratories at M. I. T. Professor Charles Cross of the Physics Department had extended this courtesy and given him a laboratory. There he continued his work on vacuum-tube discharges. By the next spring (1897) successful negotiations were under way for an instructorship at the University of Wisconsin.

The Wood family spent the summer at Cataumet, Massachusetts, on Buzzards Bay. Wood’s cousin, Bradley Davis, was working at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, within bicycling distance, and some old friends owned a summer cottage there. Wood says he was taken on as outboard ballast by the owners of one of the small racing boats that took part in all the Corinthian yacht club races; he hugely enjoyed the jockeying for a start, which was a new experience for him, though he had sailed a small boat all his life. While in bathing one day he happened to invert a wooden pail over his head, and holding it down on his shoulders with his hands and kicking with his feet, amused the children by the sight of an animated pail moving along by itself. Next day he cut a rectangular hole in one side, set a piece of plate glass in it for a window, and put forty pounds of lead boat ballast around the rim. This weight held the bucket down over the head when filled with air and submerged in water, and enabled the wearer to sink comfortably to the bottom. Then, antedating Beebe, they connected the bucket to a bicycle pump (operated on a rowboat) with twenty feet of rubber tubing, and stayed under water as long as they liked, viewing the fish, seaweed, and submarine landscape.

STUDENT IN BERLIN: Wood in the private laboratory he rigged up in the attic of the University of Berlin laboratory.

LILIENTHAL’S LAST FLIGHT: A photograph made by Wood in 1896 of the last successful flight of Otto Lilienthal, Germany’s great pioneer glider. On his next attempt the following day – Wood was invited to attend but couldn’t – Lilienthal was killed.

When Robert Wood obtained in 1897 the academically humble and poorly paid post of junior instructor in physics at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, he was a young man just turning his twenty-ninth year, married, with two children — a third, Elizabeth, soon to be born — and he was completely ignorant of the highly special branch of physics destined to bring him his later greatest glory. But while he knew next to nothing yet of physical optics, he was already a daring experimenter in the general field, and began almost immediately to revolutionize undergraduate classroom technique at Madison.

It all began gaily with a series of lecture circuses, staged for the edification and joy of the students, climaxing soon in mirages and tornadoes. The idea that he, as well as Nature’s God, could create these phenomena had come to him the previous summer in San Francisco, when he’d noticed one day a beautiful mirage on the city sidewalk at the top of a hill, where one could look along a long stretch of sun-heated pavement with a sky background behind it. The pavement appeared to be flooded with water in which the inverted reflection of pedestrians was clearly visible. Wood had stationed his two small children at the end of the pavement and photographed the result. Today this type of mirage is observed constantly by motorists on pavements or streets, but at that time it had only been reported as occurring on wide expanses of hot sand in the desert. To create his miniature phantasmic oases and actual whirling sandstorms he procured four flat sheets of iron, each about four feet long and eight inches wide. These he laid end to end, supported on iron stands, making a long, narrow, level vista, which he sprinkled thickly with sand. At the further end he mounted a mirror which, when viewed from the opposite end, showed the reflected image of the sky- backed window. A row of miniature mountains and some palm trees, cut out of paper and arranged on the sand in front of the mirror, represented the horizon of his desert landscape, which was warmed from below by a row of small gas burners under the iron plates instead of from above by the sun. Would it work on this small scale? He lit the burners and commenced observations. The mountains and palm trees were clearly silhouetted against the bright sky, but presently a small pool of brilliantly shining water appeared in front of them at the base of the mountains. If the eyes were raised an inch or two above the level of the sand, the lake vanished, only to reappear as soon as the viewpoint was depressed, just as does a real mirage if we ascend a small hillock. And now the pool increased in size and the reflected images of the mountains appeared, and “if the eye was lowered a trifle more, the mountain chain disappeared completely in the illusory lake, which had now become an inundation”. Needless to state, the students were enchanted — almost to the point of howling with joy — and from then on the new “prof” was ace-high.

Wood next regaled them with his tornadoes. The atmospheric conditions (a layer of hot air close to the ground, with cooler air above) which exist with mirages also give rise to the “dust whirls” so often seen on American deserts and, on a larger scale, to tornadoes. One of the metal plates (cleared of sand) was sprinkled with precipitated silica powder and heated by a few burners. In a few minutes beautiful little whirlwinds began to run about over the surface, spinning the light powder up in funnel-shaped vortices, which lasted sometimes ten or fifteen seconds. By sprinkling a large square plate of sheet iron with sal ammoniac and heating it strongly by Bunsen burners, white fumes were given off, and presently, at the center of the plate, there mounted to a height of six or eight feet a most perfect miniature tornado of white smoke!

A little later in the year he invented a new form of pseudoscope. When viewed through this instrument, an old-fashioned washbowl appeared as a white dome, and when a marble was dropped into it, it seemed to roll up and down over the surface of the dome in defiance of the law of gravitation, finally stopping on the summit!

Another memorable lecture-room stunt was his demonstration of the curved flight of baseballs as pitched by the then Dizzy Deans — leading on to the parabolic orbits of planets and comets as pitched by the Lord God Almighty. The limited space in the lecture room had raised difficulties. If the curve was to be made at all apparent in that limited space, the ball would have to be exceedingly light and the axial rotation very rapid. Wood found the ordinary oak ball or oak apple suitable for this purpose. A ping-pong ball might have been even better. A strip of rubber band six or eight inches long and one- eighth inch wide was wound under tension around the ball, two or three turns being enough, and the ball catapulted forward by means of the remainder of the band. A total deflection of forty-five degrees was easily obtained, and when pitching the “rise” (in which case the free part of the band is below) the ball, starting in horizontal flight, would often ascend half way to the ceiling. Try it for yourself, if you don’t believe it.

An experiment followed showing in miniature the elliptical and parabolic orbits of the planets and comets around the sun. The conical pole piece of a vertical electro-magnet was covered with a large sheet of plate glass, and a steel bicycle ball projected toward a point a little to one side of the magnet, which represented the sun. The ball whirled around in a beautiful ellipse with the sun at one focus, as Wood demonstrated with a glass plate covered with a thin film of soot, obtained by holding it over a smoking flame. In this case the ball left a record of its path on the film.

The publication of a scientific paper on this experiment led Wood into his first brief polemic. An older professor of physics in one of London’s universities criticized the paper in a letter to the London Nature, saying that the experiment did not illustrate Newtonian orbits, as the magnetic attraction varied as the inverse fifth power and not as the inverse square as in the case of gravitation. This was young Wood’s first slap — but he sat down and drew a diagram of his experiment with the lines of magnetic force put down and realized at once that the ball was not coming in along the lines of force, but was cutting across them at an angle, and that it was the horizontal component only that governed the orbit. He set one of his young students to measure the effective force in the plane of the glass plate, and it turned out to be very nearly proportional to the inverse square. In the meantime, letters of criticism had appeared in several other English technical journals, and Wood joyfully sent off a rejoinder giving the results of the actual measurements.

These must have been great days for the students at Madison, while Wood’s introduction of excitement, dramatics, and circus technique was beginning to attract world-wide attention both to him and the university. He had been from earliest childhood, and still is today, a circus man, a showman — just as were Archimedes, Galileo, and Copernicus. He is full of childish vanity, God knows, and dearly loves the limelight and applause — but the excitement is more in the thing shown than in himself, so that while he sometimes seems to be an egotist and exhibitionist, he is not actually one in the unpleasant connotation of the words. This distinction was keenly sensed by Professor Benjamin Snow, then head of the Department of Physics at Madison. A new young instructor, or assistant professor as he presently became, was and still is small potatoes in any major university, and if Wood had not been encouraged by this important ally higher up in the faculty — if there’d been an academic stuffed shirt at the head of the department — he could scarcely have obtained the necessary cooperation. Luckily, Snow himself was a dynamic, enthusiastic lecturer and fond of spectacular stunts. The fun Snow and his young instructor had together is recorded in Wood’s notes.

Young Professor Wood’s early and final decision to make physical optics his special field came in a curious way, toward the end of his first year at Madison. Professor Snow had asked him to undertake a graduate course of lectures on that subject — which Wood had never studied before. He willingly agreed and began to bone up, keeping just a jump ahead of his classes at first. He says that when the bell rang at the end of the hour he had just about reached the end of his knowledge of the subject. But soon he began pulling ahead. He was reading the current journals of physics and found that marvelous new fields of optics were being opened up which were not treated in the textbook he was using, Thomas Preston’s Theory of Light. By the end of the year he had done enough independent study to realize that Preston was at least ten years behind the times. So he made his decision — he would make physical optics his specialty, and he would write his own textbook!

You will have to go a long way to beat that, I think, as a piece of sheer scholastic impudence. But the joker is that he did it — and that the monumental opus stands today, in its third revised edition and translated into German, French, Russian, and other languages, as one of the world’s standard books on the subject. The book was to take five years to complete, and was not to appear until Wood had gone to Johns Hopkins, but he immediately plunged into experimental work that was to get him world-wide attention and, in the local papers, the name of the Wisconsin Wizard.

Just what was the subject that Robert Wood was choosing? Physical optics is the scientist’s name for what he practices when he combines the resources of physics and chemistry to study and learn all he can of the nature, habits, and possible uses of light. In a sense it is a science that is as old as man’s first speculation of the cause of the rainbow; but as a modern science it may be said to date from Sir Isaac Newton, who first proved that a prism simply breaks white light into its component parts, which can be reassembled again into white light. For nearly two hundred years after Newton, scientists were preoccupied with the basic characteristics of ordinary light. They measured its velocity through space. They noted how light rays were bent when they passed through other media, such as glass, quartz, water, or colored solutions, and they formulated the laws of this bending, or refraction, to give us the telescope and the microscope. They noted how light passed through a narrow slit tends to spread out, and how no shadow, when minutely examined, shows a sharp break between black and white, and they named this phenomenon diffraction. They studied also the phenomenon of interference, in which one ray of light cancels out another and complete darkness results. By the middle of the nineteenth century they knew enough about light to know that light, heat, electricity, and magnetism were allied phenomena: they were waves of energy radiating in a hypothetical medium called the ether, and they differed from one another only in their wave lengths and their frequency of vibration.

The classical theory of light had thus been rounded out long before Wood came on the scene. But vast new possibilities in physical optics had been opened up in 1859 when the spectroscope came into use for detecting the chemical nature of substances. A spectroscope is nothing more than a prism mounted between a source of light and an adjustable eyepiece (or photographic plate) for accurate observation. The prism bends each color of light that enters it at a different angle; it is the spreading out (the scientist calls it dispersion) of the component parts of white light that gives you the rainbow or solar spectrum you see in a crystal chandelier or in a spectroscope when sunlight is passed through it. But Bunsen and Kirchhoff in 1859 discovered that if, instead of passing sunlight through a spectroscope, you used the light of chemical substances heated to luminosity, you got spectra of an entirely different kind, and that the substance could be identified by its characteristic spectrum (Wood had identified the origin of the boarding-house hash by just this method).

This discovery made the spectroscope one of the major instruments of modern science, and opened almost illimitable fields for physical optics. For light became not only something to be examined in itself, but a powerful tool for examining the nature of the physical world. The minutest traces of substances revealed themselves in their spectra; and the most distant nebulae and stars showed their composition — and even their velocity and direction — in their spectra. The subject became more complicated as it developed, for it was found that the same substance gave different spectra depending on the physical state in which it was. Thus the analysis of spectra revealed not only the chemical composition of substances, but the physical condition in which they existed as well. And different types of spectra were investigated: the emission spectra of luminous bodies, and the absorption spectra emitted when light of various kinds is passed through non- luminous liquids and gases. With all this development, the task of the scientist in physical optics became that of subjecting light to every conceivable kind of test to make it tell more of its nature and the nature of its source. He studied the emission of light by luminous bodies under various types of excitation, such as sparks, electric arcs, and gases at low pressure in vacuum tubes carrying an electric current. He examined fluorescence, or the emission by certain substances of light of a different color from that of the light played upon them. He placed the source of light in powerful electric and magnetic fields. And he carried his investigations beyond the bounds of visible light to the region of the infrared and the ultraviolet and X rays.

FISH-EYE VIEWS: Photographs Wood made with his “fish-eye” camera (see here). Top: the first outdoor photograph taken – a railroad trestle seen from directly underneath. Bottom: a photograph Wood took of himself in the window of his laboratory, by putting his camera at the end of a six-foot plank and working the shutter by remote control.

MORE FISH-EYE VIEWS. Top: the camera is on the ground and a group of men stand in a circle around it. A group of fishermen standing around a small trout pool would look something like this to the trout looking upward from the bottom of the pool. Bottom: a photograph of McCoy Hall at Johns Hopkins, taken from across the street.

When Wood came on the scene at the end of the nineteenth century, physical optics was in this exciting stage of evolution. And physics in general was in one of its greatest transitional stages — the stage between the atom and Newtonian physics and the electron and Einstein. Wood’s role was to be the daring experimentalist whose work would continually challenge the formulations of the theoretical and mathematical physicists, and thus bring them closer to the ultimate truth. And equally important, his experimental demonstrations would confirm the truth of many of their purely theoretical conclusions. His first major contribution to physical optics is a beautiful example of this — and also an example of the amazing scope of his special field of science. Here is his account.

It was the total eclipse of the sun on May 28, 1900, that started me on research problems, the solution of which might be considered as contributing to knowledge in the field of physical optics. What had gone on before was for the most part along the line of demonstrations and interpretations. The Naval Observatory at Washington had invited me to become a member of its eclipse expedition and I was stationed with the group “on location” at Pinehurst, North Carolina, near the center of the belt of totality where the duration of the total phase was at its maximum. Here I had my first view of the solar corona and the red hydrogen flames blazing up at various points on the rim of the sun. The “flash” spectrum was of especial interest to me. Just before totality, when the edge of the sun is about to disappear behind the moon, one sees for a second or two a thin crescent of fire, which, if viewed through a diffraction grating or prism, is spread out into a spectrum of colored crescents, of all the colors of the spectrum, separated by dark intervals of various widths. This is the so-called chromospheric or “flash” spectrum, the chromosphere being the atmosphere of luminous metallic vapors that surround the sun. It is the absorption by this atmosphere of glowing vapor of the far brighter light of the incandescent fluid surface of the sun that produces the dark lines in the sun’s spectrum shown by the spectroscope. These lines are not absolutely black but contain the less brilliant light of the luminous vapor.

On my return to Madison in the autumn I read in the October number of the Astrophysical Journal an article by W. H. Julius, the Dutch astronomer, advancing the bold theory that the “flash” spectrum was due to anomalous dispersion of the white light originating at the fluid surface of the sun. I immediately started work to see if the “flash” spectrum could be produced in the laboratory. Before Christmas I had sent off to the Astrophysical Journal an account of a successful experimental verification of the theory of Julius. To accomplish this it would be necessary to form on a white surface an atmosphere of sodium vapor in which the density changed very rapidly as the surface was approached. This I accomplished by heating metallic sodium in an iron spoon just below the under surface of a slab of plaster of Paris, expecting that condensation of the vapor on the cold surface would produce the required change of density. The white surface on the further side of the sodium atmosphere was illuminated by an intense beam of sunlight concentrated by a large lens. This represented the white hot surface of the sun, while the sodium atmosphere represented the chromosphere. Viewing the white spot with a telescope and direct vision prism, and moving the instrument upward, thus causing the spot to become fore shortened into a line, the sun’s dark absorption lines appeared, just as they do in the case of an eclipse, when the sun’s disk is nearly covered by the moon. On moving the spectroscope until it was just inside of the plane of the illuminated surface, the solar spectrum vanished, and there suddenly blazed out two narrow yellow lines in the place occupied by the dark absorption lines of the continuous spectrum which had just vanished. Julius wrote me immediately of his delight at the outcome of this experiment, which furnished strong support for his theory. As a result of the successful outcome of this experiment I realized that a study of the optical properties of the dense absorbing vapor of metallic sodium would probably yield results of importance for the confirmation of current optical theories, and I decided to commence with a study of the dispersion of the vapor.

* * *

Here you have a beautiful example of the magnificent range of Wood’s field of physics. A man reproduces in the laboratory a model of something that is taking place ninety-two million miles away, and contributes to our knowledge of the nature of our prime source of light. The experiment is interesting in another way, for it shows an abiding characteristic of Wood’s experimental technique — his use of the simplest kind of equipment in the most daring way. You will see a lot more of this in the rest of the book: old iron pipes, abandoned bicycle parts, household bric-a-brac — all these play their parts in some of Wood’s most important work. The man has a genius for using the instrument closest to hand for his own purposes.

Wood’s work on sodium vapor and its optical properties, which began with this experiment, was to continue through most of his career. Maybe it was the small boy in Wood that made him attach himself to this substance, which has the unusual property of exploding violently when it comes in contact with water. At any rate, he set himself the task of making it yield all its secrets. In doing so he made basic contributions to our modern theories of the nature of all matter.

With sodium vapor, and also with iodine and mercury vapor, Wood was soon getting hitherto unknown types of spectra. His results gave the theoretical physicists immediate sharp pain and anguish. Without having asked their permission, this troublesome young experimenter had increased the number of spectrum lines in the principal series of sodium from the eight previously known to forty-eight, and had found a band of continuous absorption in the ultraviolet region. On the theory current at the close of the nineteenth century, each spectrum line was supposed to be emitted by a separate “vibrator” in the atom; or, as Darrow expressed it, an atom was regarded as being analogous to a clarion of bells. Rowland himself once said that the iron atom must be regarded as more complicated than a grand piano. Wood’s results made a further complication, and it was not until Niels Bohr in 1913 formulated our present theory of the nature of the atom that Wood’s results could be explained; and in Bohr’s first paper on the subject he cited Wood’s work on sodium as the most perfect confirmation of his theory of atomic radiation.

It was in Madison that Wood started another line of special interest in his field that was to stick with him for life. He became interested in the construction and uses of diffraction gratings. These are plates of glass or metal upon which have been ruled a large number of fine lines (sometimes as many as thirty thousand to the inch). Diffraction gratings perform the same function as prisms, dispersing light into its components, and for many kinds of spectroscopic work are greatly superior to prisms. Naturally their construction is a delicate task. The great Rowland made the finest gratings of his time in his laboratory at Johns Hopkins, and Wood was later to carry on and improve Rowland’s process at that institution. And as I write this he is getting ready to go to California with his chef d’œuvre!

Wood’s work with diffraction gratings had one immediate by-product that gave him wide attention while he was still in Madison — the invention of a new process of color photography which no one had previously dreamed of. It came about in a curious way. Wood had been invited by Professor Snow to a meeting of the Town and Gown Club, a select group of local potentates and faculty members which met once a month and listened patiently to an hour’s dull lecture. Membership was considered the highest honor in Madison, and it was deemed a distinction even to be invited as a guest. Apparently Wood was insensible to this honor, and smoked throughout the lecture and thought his own thoughts.

On the way home, as he and Snow were tramping through the deep snow, Wood suddenly said: “I’ve worked out all the details of a radically new process of color photography. If you take a diffraction grating, put it in front of a lens before a light, and put your eye in the green of the spectrum, the whole surface appears green. If another grating with a coarser spacing is put beside it, this grating will shine with a red light”. And all the way home through the snowstorm Wood proceeded to describe in detail the whole process, which he had thought out completely during the Town and Gown lecture.

In the spring of 1899 Wood conceived the idea of studying light waves through their analogy with sound waves — and of projecting drawings of the latter on a cinematographic screen. There were, properly speaking, no motion pictures in those days, but the primitive machine had already been invented, and Wood was the first to foresee its possibilities in connection with animated drawings[5].

He had been puzzling over what form the light wave must assume in some of the complicated processes of reflection, as, for example, in a hollow spherical mirror. It occurred to him that this question might be solved by making use of the analogy between sound and light. A German physicist named Toepler had devised an instrument by which it was possible to photograph the spherical sound wave given off by the “snap” of an electric spark. This wave is, in fact, a spherical shell of highly compressed air, which expands with velocity of more than a thousand feet per second. To catch it before it has passed out of the field of the camera, it must be illuminated by the light of a second spark which occurs at about one ten- thousandth of a second later. With Toepler’s instrument, he made a long series of photographs of sound waves undergoing reflection and refraction, as well as diffraction and dispersion. One of the photographs showed the reflection of a sound wave from a little flight of steps made of glass and placed beneath the spark. The echo from the flight of steps consisted of a train of waves and constituted a musical note of high pitch. This phenomenon, the conversion of an explosive sound into a musical note, can be verified by clapping the hands together in front of a flight of steps, if one is in the open air where no echoes from the walls or ceiling interfere with the observation of the musical note which is echoed back from the steps.

The reflection of these waves from curved surfaces was extremely complicated. He first worked out a geometrical method of constructing their forms from theory, as they went through their contortions. These evolutions he drew on paper in black ink, by the hundreds, and then photographed them one at a time in succession on motion-picture film, which had only just been put on the market. Next he obtained a machine for projection, and found that the method gave admirable results. The black line representing the sound wave moved along, twisting and folding back upon itself in curious ways, and gave a striking picture of what was actually also happening to light waves in the case of reflection of light under similar conditions. Practically all of the optical phenomena of reflection and refraction of light were reproduced by sound waves and could now be studied in a new way.

The results were communicated to scientific journals here and abroad. Also the daily newspapers, caring nothing about the analogy with light waves — which was the only thing Wood did care about — were excited by the novelty of “seeing” sound waves, and reproduced page after page of the photographed drawings.

In January, 1900, Wood received an invitation from the Royal Society of Arts asking him to come to London and deliver a lecture on his color photography at the February meeting. Then came a letter from the physicist, Sir Charles Vernon Boys, inviting him to present before the Royal Society his animated photographs of sound waves. There are many Royal Societies, Royal Astronomical, Royal Photographic, Royal Microscopical, Royal Society of Arts, and Royal What-Have-You, but there is only one Royal Society tout court — founded in 1660 and unquestionably the most important scientific body in the world. Professor Snow was greatly excited and took the matter up with President Adams, who took it up with the Regents of the University, and Wood was given a two months’ leave of absence.

Boys met him on his arrival in London, put him up at the Savile Club and the Athenaeum, and secured suitable “lodgings” for him just around the corner from the former. His lecture before the Society of Arts was on St. Valentine’s day, with Sir William Abney in the chair. But the great occasion was still to come…

The young American professor’s appearance before the Royal Society was scheduled for the following afternoon. Boys had finally located and set up a motion picture projecting machine, of which there were then only two in London.

When they entered the sacred portals, the Fellows of the Society were having tea in the noble assembly room from which they all presently proceeded to the auditorium. Lord Lister, the venerable father of antiseptic surgery, presided from a thronelike chair behind an elevated desk. The great gold mace of Cromwell’s time was brought in on a red velvet cushion and laid solemnly on the desk in front of the president. Cromwell had treated it with less formality, and his celebrated order, “Remove that bauble!” has echoed down the ages.

In the audience sat many of the great scientific celebrities then alive in London: Crookes, Dewar, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Lord Rayleigh. In a moment they would be listening to “a young man from Wisconsin”, who would be standing where stood Isaac Newton, Davy, Faraday, and all the great in Britain’s scientific history. But if you think all this overwhelmed our young man from Wisconsin, you don’t yet know him. Says he in his notes: “I showed them the sound-wave photographs and moving diagrams without a hitch and spoke extemporaneously, feeling no more embarrassment than when lecturing to my students at Madison”.

Nonsense! Actually, he was acutely aware of the tremendous honor, and he was undoubtedly boiling with excitement. For it was the dawn of world-wide fame.

Following the death of the great, gruff Henry Rowland at Johns Hopkins in 1901, Wood was offered and accepted a full professorship in experimental physics there. It was a high honor for so young a man, no matter how fantastic a genius. Gertrude went ahead to Baltimore and selected a house on St. Paul Street in a city block that had looked upon the stoning by secessionists of the Massachusetts regiment on its way to Washington. Returning to Madison, the furniture was packed up and sent on in care of the Baltimore house agent, who installed it on its arrival. The family reached Baltimore late in September. They opened the Baltimore house, unpacked the crate containing the Stanley Steamer, and bounced over the cobblestones with which the entire city was then paved. Surface drainage disposed of all the water used for washing purposes, a thin stream, sky blue on wash day, running out under every back gate and along a shallow gutter in the brick sidewalk. Loose bricks acted as force pumps, squirting a jet of water up your trouser leg almost to the knees if you stepped on one, efficiently adjusted with respect to its neighbors. Wood called them “bath bricks”. The alleys and some of the street crossings had high stepping stones on which you crossed dry-shod in case of heavy rains, but at which the Stanley Steamer shied.

Of his work at Johns Hopkins, Wood says:

Early in 1905 Wood finished the monumental work on physical optics which was destined to make him an outstanding authority on all subjects connected with light. The manuscript of Physical Optics was in the hands of Macmillan, destined to appear officially in the autumn of the same year, but it was due in the meantime for the oddest “prepublication” in the history of scientific books. Here’s what apparently happened.

In 1905 the Wood family spent the summer again in France. Just as they were leaving Paris for Brittany, an enormous bundle of galley proofs arrived from New York. Wood dumped them in the Darracq, to be corrected and mailed en route. The Macmillan Company claims with truth the first official publication, but it seems to have appeared previously, “serially” and uncopyrighted, dipped into with amazement by tourists, in hotel privies and backhouses scattered all over Normandy and Brittany. Not caring to bother with the two sets of duplicates of the galley proofs, he had tossed them into hotel wastebaskets, as he mailed the corrected set back, in installments, to New York. Motoring to Paris over the same route two months later, they found large sheafs of Physical Optics hung on nails as toilet paper in many of the inns where they had previously stopped.

Weird extracurricular excursions, alarms, and adventures kept occurring to Wood and his brain children when they returned to Baltimore, despite the steady progress of his serious scientific work. One of these occurred when a wealthy Baltimore engineer by the name of Otto Luyties conceived what may have been the first practical idea in the world for experiment with helicopters and invited the by now famous Johns Hopkins professor to aid him in matters of theory. Since Luyties was paying all the expenses, Wood agreed cheerfully to lend all the “theory” he could.

Wood’s invention of the so-called mercury telescope — a revolving dish of quicksilver at the bottom of a pit — was one of the most sensational, useless, and significant things he ever did. It was constructed on the principle that mercury in a shallow metal dish, when rotated, assumes the form of a paraboloidal reflecting mirror. The dish of mercury was placed at the bottom of a well beneath an old cowshed with a hole ripped in its roof, and rotated slowly by a motor while the observer at the top of the well looked down through an eyepiece lens at the enlarged, reflected images of celestial bodies as they crossed the zenith.

Wood had the machine built by Warner and Swasey of Cleveland, the celebrated makers of large astronomical telescopes. Every conceivable refinement had to be made to secure a smooth rotation of the dish of mercury, since any jar to the dish would cause ripples on the surface of the mercury and distort the images formed in the mirror. Wood had the brilliant idea of accomplishing this by surrounding the mercury dish with an independently mounted rotating collar, driven by an electric motor and attached to the mercury dish only by thin bands of rubber. These rotated the dish without transmitting the vibrations of the motor. The focal length of the instrument could be varied from four to fourteen feet by altering the speed of the motor. Standing at the edge of the well and looking down into it, one saw the images of the overhead stars, enhanced to the brilliance of distant arc lights, suspended in space at the mouth of the well — an especially marvelous sight when the great star cluster in the constellation of Hercules crossed the zenith.

On August 27, 1908, the New York Times gave the entire streamered front page of its Section II to a profusely illustrated piece entitled:

A NEW IDEA FOR READING THE STARS

Wood of Johns Hopkins at East Hampton Working on a Telescope that isn’t a Telescope with a Lens that isn’t a Lens.

On Sunday April 11, 1909, the Baltimore Sun eructed an even more sensational front-page spread, with black-and-white drawings of Wood looking like Tarzan, a huge hunk of cratered moon resembling Swiss green cheese, the ripped-up cowshed looking like a cowshed, and the diagramed gadgets in a cross section of the well beneath it resembling nothing then on earth, but presaging the cartoons that were later to make Rube Goldberg famous. The headlines were equally diverting.

New Telescope May Solve the Riddle of the Universe!

IS MARS INHABITED?

MERCURY REFLECTOR INVENTED BY BALTIMORE GENIUS TO BRING THE MOON WITHIN A FEW MILES OF EARTH.

The Associated Press and popular science syndicates went to town on it, while the cowshed became a shrine for pilgrimages of scientists and curiosity-seekers. It got on the cables. The French gazettes wrote about the “Puits et Plancher Poulie”; the Berlin journals announced the epoch-making invention of “Ein originelles Spiegelteleskop." A couple of Teutonic astronomers made the pilgrimage, peered down into the well, exclaimed, “Gott in Himmell Wunderschön”

The idea which excited everybody was that if a twenty-inch dish of quicksilver at the bottom of an old well under a cowshed could work such wonders, then a twenty-foot dish down a mighty mine shaft, as it were, would bring the moon to Baltimore and the Bronx. Even the Boston Transcript began to get excited over signaling the Martians — though Wood himself, needless to say, had never made nor countenanced any such fantastic blurb-and-boloney bunk.

Arthur Gordon Webster, then head of the Department of Physics at Clark University, who was one of the first to visit East Hampton, had been humorously scornful of the mercury telescope, and had written in the Wood guest book the jingle which appears at the head of this chapter. The astronomer W. H. Pickering had come visiting later, and after Wood had resolved the quadruple star Epsilon Lyrae for him in the mercury telescope, he had written in the same guest book the following happy pun:

When Epsilon Lyrae is well shown, Truth will not have searched Her mirror in vain.

His brother, the even more famous Edward Pickering, director of the Harvard Observatory, said, at the top of all the first excitement, “I think we’d better wait..”.

And Wood himself — who had found an old penciled record on the cowshed door, “Heifer calf, May 1860”, and added in his own scrawl, “Mercury telescope, June 1908” — was in complete accord with Pickering.

Not so, however, the great Empire State of Texas. The Texans were all for signaling Mars instanter. The idea of waiting didn’t appeal to them at all — nor to that late great religious- fundamentalist archaeologist, the Reverend Professor William S. Cole of Atlanta, Georgia, and the Bible Belt. He felt that God had inspired Professor Wood and that we might obtain even a glimpse of the Pearly Gates through the roof of the humble cowshed. Professor Cole had no financial backing and couldn’t get going on his idea, but wealthy Texas began bombarding Wood with telegrams. The first one came from Fort Worth, was signed by the Star Telegram, and read: “What would it cost to establish plant in West Texas to observe Mars with your mercury reflection would you be willing to conduct experiment large uninhabited areas clarified atmosphere and altitude make conditions perfect”.

On its heels the same day came another urgent wire: “Kindly let us know if you are willing to establish experimental plant huge mercury mirrors if all expenses guaranteed Stamford Texas will stand for ten thousand dollars perhaps more please answer”.

When Dr. Wood replied declining the offer and explained to the newspapers and Associated Press that he hadn’t the remotest idea of going to Texas or trying to signal Mars, the Texans frantically raised the ante to $50,000 and wired: “We will do all we can to help you and assure you we are in earnest”.

Even this failed to melt the professor’s heart. In fact he became a bit impatient and ironic. When prodded by the New York Herald about schemes for signaling Mars, including one which involved covering several square miles of desert with mirrors, he wrote in reply:

As to the project of attracting the attention of the Martians to the fact that there are rational beings on the earth, it seems to me that if there are any who insist upon making us conspicuous in this way it would be better to devise some simpler way than the construction of a mirror several miles in diameter. A large black spot on the white alkali plains could be constructed at much less expense, and would be as easily perceived by the Martians, if they exist and have telescopes as powerful as ours. It would be as easy to “wink” signals with the black spot as with a mirror of equal size, probably easier.

The spot could be made in small sections of black cloth arranged to roll up on long cylinders, exposing the white ground underneath, the cylinders being operated simultaneously by electric motors. I am unable to say how much four square miles of cloth would cost. You will have to consult the dry goods houses or the people who write arithmetic.

We should probably get an answer, for the Martians are supposedly older and wiser than we are.

I have never, and am not now, giving any attention at all to the problem of signaling to Mars.

* * *

I don’t think we need go any further to justify my adjective “sensational”. Nor need we blame Professor Wood for the sensationalism. He has perpetrated some gigantic and Gargantuan hoaxes — as hoaxes — but is of a rigid, almost ultraconservative integrity in the field of serious science. He had never sanctioned any of the fantastic and gratuitous predictions. Indeed, he had never claimed anything for the mercury telescope. He had merely invented it, and there it was…

As for my second adjective, “useless”… well, the mercury telescope isn’t there, or anywhere, any more. When the moon rises over the cowshed, no mirror flashes, no Katie waits, and no quicksilver gleams. It has gone the way of the heifer calf. It just didn’t work out pragmatically. One thing I wondered about, and which may have had something to do with its demise, was how the hell you could point a hole in the ground at the particular planet, star, or galaxy you wanted to study at the time? Wood says my wonder is justified, and that later he mounted over the pit a twenty-inch plane mirror of silvered glass and was able to view objects which were widely removed from the zenith. I doubt if it could have helped much.

Now to justify our third adjective, as to its being one of the most “significant” things Wood ever did. The method of driving the mirror with an independent circular rotor he subsequently applied to all of the dividing engines used for ruling diffraction gratings, and at once got rid of certain errors in the proper spacing of the lines. It has since become a standard engineering practice. So, despite its immediate uselessness, the whole thing was of an instructive significance, as an example of how your pure scientist sets himself a problem — which may or may not lead to practical results — and solves the problem by breaking it into its component parts and dealing separately with each. Wood’s own technical description (written at the time and preserved in his scientific papers) of the problem, its motivations and the technique employed in solving it, is a clear, modest, and illuminating exposition of how the wheels go round — in the making of a mercury telescope and also in the scientific brain.

Before it went into limbo, the mercury dish mirrored one profound reflection, not of starlight but of rural American philosophy. It was during the Bryan-Taft campaign, and an old East Hampton farmer, after staring at the myriad stars reflected in the mercury telescope, sighed and said,

“Well, I don’t know as it makes so much difference after all whether Taft or Bryan’s elected..”.

The old farmer’s reflection was profound, but was it original? Or have people been saying it since the time of Pythagoras?

Now while the mercury telescope was following the heifer calf into oblivion, Wood was already engaged in the construction — in this same unique barn-cowshed-laboratory at East Hampton — of a gigantic spectroscope, or rather spectroscopic camera, which was destined to become an entirely different kettle of cats. It was, and for years continued to be, the largest and best instrument of its sort in the world, and in addition to making the Woods’ house cat as immortal as the parrot of Archimedes, it marked an epochal advance in spectral knowledge and analysis. One of the many things it did was to resolve for the first time the complicated spectrum of iodine, which has some forty thousand lines. But whenever this is mentioned by scientists and physicists, whether here or in Tokyo or Singapore, somebody always interrupts to tell the story of the cat, so I think I’d better follow custom and dispose of the Wood pussy. There are many versions of the story. It was twisted by Time a couple of years ago, and became a sort of feline Rin-Tin-Tin animal serial in the hands of the newspaper feature writers, who turned the cat into a permanent magician’s assistant and had it regularly doing its stunt whenever Wood called, “Pussy, pussy, come and clean the cobwebs”. It had, indeed, so many variants that I’m not sure Wood himself is any longer able to give a trustworthy account, and the cat cannot be interviewed because she’s dead. Yet what apparently actually happened is simple and easily told. The spectroscope had a long wooden tube, forty-two feet in length and six inches or so in diameter, projecting out through the side of the barn, to an iron post in the cowyard, fitted at one end with a diffraction grating and at the other with a slit and a mirror. During the first winter and spring after its construction, the spiders got in and wove their webs. When Wood came down in June he spied the arachnean invasion. He grabbed the family cat and stuck it — not without a struggle — into one end of the tube, which he then closed up. Pussy, having no alternative, squirmed her way through the tunnel towards the daylight and bounded out at the other end trailing a bridal veil of spiderwebs over the fence and across the lawn. It hadn’t occurred to the Professor that it would be long remembered, though he casually mentioned the episode in a technical paper in the Philosophical Magazine. It was just a quick, efficient, costless way of obtaining a desired result with whatever came nearest to hand.

This spectroscopic camera was a marvel of scientific — and practical — ingenuity. Friends, fellow-scientists, curiosity-seekers, and journalists again flocked to the now world-famous barn. There are many clippings, some highly technical, which describe what was going on there in 1912. The picture which comes clearest to me is the description which appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of Sunday, September 1, 1912, in which the writer said:

One passing along the road would never suspect that the place was other than a quaint building housing farm animals until the professor swings open the huge doors and shows you the interior.

The new spectroscope, which the professor built entirely himself, is essentially so simple a mechanism that one would hardly expect any startling results could be obtained from it. It consists of a long wooden tunnel, forty-two feet in length and seven inches square, terminating at one end in an achromatic lens, six inches in diameter, having a forty-two-foot focus, just the length of the tunnel. Beyond the lens, at the same end, is the diffracting grating which decomposes the light into the prismatic colors. This grating is a piece of polished metal ruled with diamond scratches, 15,000 to the inch, making a total of 75,000 vertical lines on the whole surface, which is five inches square.

The grating rotates on a vertical axis, turned by a rod and gearing wheel, so that the professor may use any part of the spectrum he wishes at a time. The instrument is so powerful that only a small part can be used at a time. The lines on the polished plate act just the same as a prism in diffracting or decomposing the light into the prismatic colors, but make the instrument much more powerful than an ordinary prism.

At the other end of the tunnel, which terminates in a dark room, is a small slit and back of that a mirror on which the sunlight is reflected from the outside by means of another mirror and a lens. This reflecting mirror and lens work as a heliostat revolving by clockwork, with the motion of the sun, so that the reflected light is always on the mirror at the dark end of the tunnel, which in turn always reflects this light through the slit to the achromatic lens and the diffraction grating. When the light is decomposed by the grating and sent back through the tunnel it is tilted slightly upward so that a photographic plate inserted just above the slit will take a photograph of the section of the spectrum on which the professor is working.

* * *

The wonderful power this instrument has in diffracting color and decomposing the spectrum is shown in many ways, each of which manifests its superiority over previous spectroscopes and the results obtained by them. In the first place, the professor said, in a small laboratory spectroscope what is known as the yellow sodium line appears as a single line, while in this new spectroscope this same line… appears as two distinct lines, separated by a distance of 5 inches!

Furthermore, the entire spectrum as seen by this instrument would be 50 feet long, while the finished spectrum magnified three times in order to study the various spectrum lines would be 150 feet in length. This is the length to which the spectrum studied by Professor Wood is extended, although he is not interested in the entire spectrum but only one part connected with his study and research work.

Professor Wood is now making a study of the absorption spectrum of iodine in connection with some other work along the same lines which he did last summer.

Despite the unwilling co-operation of the family cat, the wooden tunnel of the original East Hampton spectroscope became unsatisfactory. Wood had built a shingled roofing along its full length. But rains and snow finally wet and warped it. So he decided to build a new tunnel underground, using sewer pipe. East Hampton had a stone mason and pipe- layer by the name of Barnes, with whom Wood had been on terms of complete understanding since the episode of the baptismal font. There are various versions of that story too. Here’s what Wood tells me actually happened.

Barnes was doing some work for us while we were renovating the place, shortly after its purchase. He was building the cesspool. One day when our own car balked, I rode downtown with him on the seat of his cart, with barrels and sieves rattling behind. As we were passing through the village, the new rector of the chapel at Amagansett came hurriedly toward us, holding up his hand as a stop signal.

“Good morning, Mr. Barnes. I trust, Mr. Barnes”, he unctuously intoned, “that you will bear in mind that you promised to come to Amagansett at your earliest opportunity and lay our new baptismal font”.

“Yes, Doc”, replied Barnes, “I’ll build your baptismal font soon’s I can, but I got to finish the Prof’s cesspool fust”.

* * *

Barnes’s comeback had so enchanted Wood that he sent for him later to build the new spectroscope tunnel. The problem, of course, was to keep the tunnel, built of terra-cotta sewer pipes with walls of irregular thickness, absolutely straight and smooth inside. This was a problem that had never confronted Barnes before.

Wood put a heliostat (a mirror operated by clockwork) in the pit at the end of the forty-foot trench, which reflected a horizontal beam of sunlight three inches above the trench bottom. He told Barnes to lay the pipes along the beam of light, each pipe being adjusted so that the circular spot of light was exactly at the center of a sheet of white paper held against its end. When the job was finished and viewed from the outside, it seemed as full of irregular little humps and twists as a convulsed snake which had tried and failed to straighten out. Barnes said disgustedly, “That’s the worst job I ever did”. Wood said, “Look through it”. Barnes looked and said, “Gosh!”

It was straight as the bore of a rifle — on the inside.

JOHNS HOPKINS PROFESSOR: Wood in 1901, when he became professor of experimental physics at Johns Hopkins University.

THE MERCURY TELESCOPE: Here we see the spinning bowl of mercury reflecting the face of Wood as he gazes at it. Since the mirror is concave, reversing reflected images, Wood’s reflection appears right side up. This photograph was taken in the barn laboratory at East Hampton, where the preliminary work was done. Later the mercury telescope was moved to a pit under an adjacent cowshed.

The average university professor is happy if he can take a full year’s sabbatical once in every seven years. But nothing is ever “average” with Wood. He took his first sabbatical in 1910- 11, another in 1913-14, went overseas again in a major’s uniform in 1917, then again soon after the armistice, and has been making long visits to Europe in intervals ever since. His growing international fame, his many invitations to lecture before learned societies abroad, his researches with European colleagues, the funds derived from the Adams endowment for publication of his work by Columbia University, the appreciation of Johns Hopkins, which always gave him half pay during absence, all contributed toward making these triennials not only possible, but reasonable.

Wood began his first so-called sabbatical in the summer of 1910, after devising earlier in the year a new type of diffraction grating which he named the Echelette.[9]

He went first to London, where he delivered the Traill Taylor Memorial Lecture, an annual function of the Royal Photographic Society, and the initial “Thomas Young Oration”, a similar affair just started by the Optical Society. He then joined his family in Paris. Elizabeth, now aged twelve, was placed in school there, and Robert, Junior, aged sixteen, at school in Geneva. Margaret, now a tall young lady of seventeen, accompanied her parents to Berlin.

In Berlin, the Woods found a pension facing the Tiergarten, near the school where Margaret chose to study art. Wood’s amateur talents in this direction had been increased in their transference to the daughter, who later made a name for herself as an outstanding portrait painter.

The family was now joined by their old friends, the Trowbridges. With Trowbridge, Wood attended the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the University of Berlin. They went as official delegates from Johns Hopkins and Princeton. The ceremonies were elaborate. Kaiser Wilhelm was there in gorgeous uniform. With him was the pretty crown princess with whom, according to Trowbridge, the irrepressible Wood (delegate from Johns Hopkins!) carried on a mild flirtation during the tedious ceremony.

Soon Wood was deep in research with Professor Rubens, who fifteen years before had encouraged him to change from chemistry to physics. The research with Rubens was on a new method they had developed for isolating and measuring the longest heat waves ever discovered. It was at the time when efforts were being made all over the world to fill the gap in the spectral region between the longest infrared heat waves and the shortest electric or radio waves, for Maxwell’s theory showed that light and electromagnetic waves differed only in length. The method which they discovered was called focal isolation and depended on the odd circumstance that crystalline quartz was exceedingly transparent to a group of waves far longer than any discovered in the infrared, while having at the same time an index of refraction much higher than for visible light, in other words “anomalous dispersion”. They succeeded in isolating heat waves of over 0.1 of a millimeter[10], the longest observed at that time.

Wood announced one day at lunch at the pension in which they were living, “We’ve found and measured the longest heat waves ever observed”.

“How long were they?” asked his daughter Margaret.

“One tenth of a millimeter”, announced Wood triumphantly.

“I don’t call that very long”, commented Margaret in a bored tone.

These invisible rays from the lamp had very curious properties, they found. A quartz plate so heavily smoked that the sun was invisible through it was perfectly transparent to them; and the same was true for a plate covered with a thick opaque layer of finely divided metallic copper, while a plate of hard rubber half a millimeter thick transmitted about 40 per cent.

Plates of rock salt, which are extremely transparent to the greater part of the infrared spectrum previously studied, were absolutely opaque to these rays.

It was a matter of considerable theoretical interest to find out whether an extremely thin plate of salt would transmit anything.

“We need a plate half a millimeter thick, if possible”, said Rubens. “I shall order one from Steinheil [an optician and lens-maker]. He can do it, I think, and we shall have it in two weeks”.

“Why not make it ourselves?” said Wood.

“Can you, then, grind and polish a rock-salt plate?” inquired Rubens in surprise.

“I don’t know”, said Wood. “I think so”.

He took the thinnest salt plate they had and ground it against a sheet of ground glass, slightly moistened with water, until it was about half a millimeter thick. This was all that was required, but the thinner the better, so Wood thought he’d see if he could go further. Attaching the plate to a match stick with sealing wax, he dipped it into a glass of warm water and dried it quickly with absorbent cotton. It was slightly thinner, and the “ground” surface had become polished and transparent. He dipped it in the water and looked at it again (as did the Hatter at the mad tea party). It was still thinner. One more dip proved to be the limit, as the plate showed evidences of going to pieces at one corner.

Rubens breezed into the room, having finished his lecture. “Well”, he said, “and can you make us the salt plate?” “Yes”, said Wood. “It’s finished”.

“And how thick is it?”

“One tenth of a millimeter”, said Wood, who had just finished measuring it.

Early in December the Woods were invited to attend the festivities in Stockholm in connection with the awarding of the Nobel prizes, and Wood was invited to deliver a lecture there on his recent researches in optics.

While carrying on the research with Rubens, he had also been investigating the optical properties of iodine. This had led to a capital discovery which was the small but solid foundation upon which he built later on one of his most important and elaborate series of discoveries, described in numerous papers under the general title of “Resonance Spectra of Iodine”, investigations that occupied him for several succeeding years and eventually, when theory caught up with experiment, were of considerable importance in unraveling the mystery of band spectra. The discovery came about in this way: having been struck, in some of his earlier work, by the similarity of the absorption spectra of sodium and iodine vapors and having prepared some glass bulbs containing iodine vapor for the purpose of studying its fluorescence and passing through one of the rooms in which a quartz mercury arc lamp of great intensity was burning, it occurred to him that possibly the iodine vapor might yield resonance spectra similar to those which he had observed and studied under such difficulties in the case of sodium. He borrowed a small hand spectroscope, set up a large lens, and formed an image of the arc on one of his bulbs. Splendid! A bright cone of fluorescent light inside of the bulb. Pointing the spectroscope at the bulb he observed a resonance spectrum far simpler and more clearly cut than any he had found with sodium, a series of bright lines, spaced with the precision of the graduations on a foot rule, extending from the green line of mercury up through the yellow-orange to the extreme red. This observation was made only a few days before his invitation to Stockholm, so he had a very young “baby” to show at his lecture.

What impressed Wood most on arrival in Stockholm was that it offered no facilities for taking a bath, although there were plenty of places where one could be given a bath. You were placed stark naked on an ironing board and scrubbed with excelsior, like a puppy, by a muscular Swedish woman. The Woods were entertained at dinner by the American Ambassador and his wife, who told Gertrude they had had a bathtub installed in their house, but found that the plumber had put the valves that controlled the hot and cold water flow on the other side of the room from the tub. When they protested that they would have to get out of the tub every time they wanted to change or adjust the temperature, they were told they “could ring for the maid”!

At the huge banquet which followed the handing out of the Nobel prizes, Gertrude was seated at the head table next to Emmanuel Nobel, a nephew of the inventor of dynamite who had founded the prizes. He told her he was just back from St. Petersburg and had brought with him an enormous earthen crock of the finest caviar, a gift from the Czar to the King. “All I could take back as a gift to the Czar”, he said, “would be a box of dynamite — and that, I’m afraid, wouldn’t be very acceptable

When the day came for his lecture, Wood performed a number of what Professor Lorentz, the famous Dutch physicist, had once designated “his beautiful and convincing experiments on the blackboard”, making pictures for his audience of everything he was talking about. It diverted them, he said, and kept them from going to sleep. They must have been well diverted, for the Woods continued to be showered with invitations.

A luncheon was given them by Professor Mittag-Loeffler at his beautiful country home. He was the Chairman of the Nobel Committee, was in Berlin in the autumn, and had extended the invitation to the Woods to come to Stockholm. He was proud of his library, said to be the finest collection of books on mathematics in the world. It was housed in a huge tower, ascended by a great spiral stairway.

Mrs. Wood tells a story about the formal reception which formed a part of the program. The Crown Princess Maud was receiving in a small room which opened off the large hall, and the chamberlain told the Woods they would be taken in soon and presented. Wood was meanwhile introduced to the first lady in waiting, a beautiful and vivacious young Englishwoman, and Mrs. Wood says the chamberlain experienced great difficulty in prying Wood loose from her when the time came for presentation to the Crown Princess.

Wood had an absurd run-in with the German customs. Going to Stockholm he had taken along a suitcase crammed with glass bulbs, lenses, prisms, rubber tubes, and other odds and ends and gadgets for the lecture. When, on the return trip, they reached the German frontier at Malmö and were lined up at the customs barrier, Wood had to open it.

“Ach! Was haben Sie hier?”

Wood explained it had all been made in Germany and was the property of the University of Berlin; that he had taken it to Stockholm for a lecture and was returning it to the University. “That makes no difference”, said the guard. “You have duty to pay”. Wood argued, but to no avail.

The customs officer emptied the case, putting all the glass together, prisms, lenses, and bulbs in one lot, brass gadgets in another lot, rubber tubes in another; and then weighed each lot, noting the weights on a card. He then spent five or ten minutes looking up the rate on glass, brass, and rubber articles, and the quartz mercury lamp, and since he couldn’t properly classify this, about another quarter of an hour slipped by. Finally he added up the column, then added it again to make sure that no mistake had been made, and said triumphantly, “Na — Ja, ja, Sie haben was zu bezahlen! Sie bezahlen zwei Mark fünf und vierzig Pfennig". The English equivalent would be roughly, “You bet your life you have duty to pay! You pay two marks and forty-five pfennigs”. Sixty-two cents for three-quarters of an hour of an official’s misspent time.

Back in Berlin, Wood continued his research, in collaboration with Professor James Franck, subsequently a Nobel prize winner. They had previously worked together on the reduction of intensity of the iodine vapor in fluorescence caused by admixtures of chemically inert gases, and they now made the remarkable discovery that when helium gas was mixed with the iodine vapor, the spectrum of widely separated lines emitted by the vapor when illuminated by the green light of the mercury arc, which Wood had discovered a few weeks before, was transformed into a band spectrum of many hundreds of lines. The theoretical physicists, who occupied themselves with the problems connected with the radiation of atoms and molecules, were unable to find any plausible explanation for any of these effects, and it was not until many years later that they were completely understood, as will appear later. The research with Franck was completed in a couple of weeks, and the paper sent off to the English and German journals of physics.

The Woods next gathered up the family and went to St.- Moritz for Christmas and winter sports. Here Wood got on real skis for the first time, and would have nothing to do with sleds or skates. An ice rink, made by flooding a half-acre rectangle behind the hotel, had no attraction for him. He refused to take lessons, but watched the experts, and bought a book on Skiing without Tears or something of that sort, and at the end of the week could execute in low gear what he optimistically called a Telemark. At the end of the second week, high speed, without sharp turns or sudden stops, did not trouble him, and he had a great thrill, he says, “when, after a climb of over two hours up the mountain behind the village, with spots that called for ‘herring-boning,’ I came down against the wind and sun in one long, wild rush, immunized against terror by excitement, and like Mark Twain in his ‘Lost on the Mountain,’ finally found myself in the back yard of the hotel”.

From St.-Moritz the Woods went to Paris, and Wood started an investigation with an Englishman, Hemsalech, in the laboratory of the Sorbonne, on a new radiant emission from the spark which he had discovered in Baltimore. He also carried out some more accurate measurements of the iodine emission lines than he had been able to make in Berlin.

In the early spring Wood and his wife made a trip to Sicily, and it was here, when the almond blossoms were pinkest, that he made his best and most striking infrared photographs, which were exhibited at the annual exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society a little later and published in the Illustrated London News. They stayed at the Hotel Politi in Syracuse, perched on the brink of the deep quarries of Latomia, in which the hundreds of Athenian prisoners were confined and starved to death after the defeat of Alcibiades by the Syracusians in 414 B.C.. In these quarries Wood made some striking infrared photographs.

I was intrigued greatly (says Wood) by seeing what purported to be the tomb of Archimedes. Reading in boyhood in my father’s old copy of Arnott’s physics about the screw pump for raising water, invented by Ar-kimmy-des (as I always pronounced it), I had constructed one by winding a long piece of lead pipe in a spiral around an old rolling pin from the kitchen closet. History says Archimedes set little value on his mechanical inventions, regarding them as beneath the dignity of pure science, but they were the things that appealed to the popular imagination and have kept his name alive after a lapse of over two thousand years — rather than his contributions to geometry and mathematics.

* * *

Wood also is annoyed sometimes when his electrical thaw, his fish-eye views, his color photography process, and other mechanical inventions are stressed in the newspapers as his major achievements.

From Sicily they went to London early in May, 1911, where Wood had been invited to give one of the “Friday evening discourses” at the Royal Institution, founded in 1799 by Count Rumford.

The Friday evening discourses dated back to the time of Sir Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday (whose experiments with electric currents laid the foundations for modern electrical engineering). They were of a semipopular nature, but were full-dress affairs, attended almost exclusively by prominent figures in scientific fields accompanied by their ladies. The lecture hall and its horseshoe-shaped lecture table were the same as they had been when Blaikley did his admirable painting showing Faraday behind the table on which his crude little coils and magnets are displayed, delivering a Friday evening lecture, on December 27, 1855. Wood had often seen the picture, and as a young instructor at Madison had possibly dreamed of one day standing behind this same lecture table, covered with his fluorescent tubes and bulbs, his ultraviolet lamps, electric sparks, and other scientific paraphernalia. Now his dream was coming true.

After the audience is seated (says Wood) there comes a hush in the conversation, and the lecturer and his family, if present, are ushered into the room through a door, previously closed and guarded, behind and a little to one side of the lecture table.

His Grace, the Duke of Northumberland, not being available at the time, Gertrude entered the hall on the arm of the Right Honorable Earl Cathcart, Vice-President, followed by my daughter Margaret, on the arm of diminutive Sir William Crookes, who came nearly up to her shoulder and whose long white mustache, waxed at the ends into two sharp spikes, fascinated her. I brought up the rear. There was a brief introduction and at last I was standing behind the famous lecture table, giving my talk on the recent experiments I had made with invisible light…

The morning after the lecture I was back at the rooms of the Institution, removing my apparatus and putting away in the glass cases such things as I had borrowed. Spying the largest Nicol polarizing prisms that I had ever seen, I asked Sir James Dewar, the director, if I could use them for a study of the polarization of the lines of my newly discovered resonance spectrum of iodine. It was of immense importance to discover if, when the fluorescence spectrum was excited by polarized light of a single color, such as the green line of the mercury arc, any or all of the eighteen lines of the fluorescent spectrum were also polarized. Dewar gave me a nice room to work in and everything that I required. It was going to be a tough job, needing a huge amount of polarized light, large mirrors, and lenses for concentrating it on the bulb containing the iodine vapor, and the big Nicol prisms for polarizing the light. Bulbs had disadvantages, and I adopted a long glass tube of good size with a bulb blown on one end and the other end drawn down like a cow’s horn, bent off to one side and painted black. This served as a dead black background against which the fluorescence could be viewed through the bulb without disturbing reflections from the glass wall. I employed two very powerful quartz mercury arcs, one above and the other to one side of the tube, a huge concave mirror behind each lamp, and two large condensing lenses between the lamps and the tube. The research was completed in a week; all of the lines were found to be strongly polarized and there were excellent photographs showing the dark bands, which indicated polarization, cutting across all of the lines. A twelve-page paper, illustrated with photographs, appeared in the Philosophical Magazine shortly afterwards. This was the fastest work that I had ever done, which was a piece of good luck, for on the day on which I had written finis to it, Dewar strolled in with his hands behind his back under the tails of his frock coat and told me gruffly, as was his habit sometimes, that I’d have to vacate my room, since Marconi was giving the next Friday evening discourse and would need it for setting up and trying out his experiments. “I’m finished”, I said, “and thank you very much”.

It was advertised that at Marconi’s lecture the audience would be able to listen to transatlantic signals coming from Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. This was at a time when some still doubted such a feat was possible.

Kites would be flown from the roof carrying the antenna, and the audience would be able to hear signals by a system of telephones distributed over the auditorium. Days before the lecture, the historic halls of the Institution were invaded by workmen moving in Marconi’s apparatus. They took down the iron balustrade of the marble stairway leading to the second story, which interfered with the hoisting of some of the larger and heavier pieces of electrical equipment to the lecture room. The entrance hall was cluttered with packing boxes and excelsior for three days, and gradually there was assembled, behind the semicircular lecture table on which Faraday had set up his little coils and magnets, such a display of impressive modern electrical appliances as one seldom sees outside a World’s Fair. A great marble switchboard with voltmeters, ammeters, rheostats, inductances, etc., etc.; several mysterious- looking polished mahogany boxes, with shining brass knobs and bars; and many other things in between these. During the afternoon preceding the lecture Marconi’s two young assistants were on the roof of the Institution, raising the tandem of great kites and tuning the receiving instruments.

This interested me enormously, as I had been playing with kites at East Hampton, and I injected myself into the party, asking questions, making suggestions, getting in their way, and making other equally ineffectual efforts to help.

Marconi read his lecture from manuscript, his elbow on the reading desk and his forehead resting on his hand. He appeared to be the least interested person in the auditorium in what he had to say, and there were no experiments. Except that towards the end of his reading he said, “I have installed the apparatus here with which the signals are transmitted and you will hear the sound of the spark discharge in this box when I close the switch”. He opened and closed it several times and we heard “Buz-buz-buz, Buzzzz-buzzzz-buzzzz, buz-buz-buz” (SOS).

About ten minutes before the end of the hour I noticed that his assistants were getting nervous. They were “off stage”, and one of them kept disappearing every few minutes, then reappearing for a hurried whispered conversation. I tiptoed over to find out what was wrong. The transatlantic signals were coming in all right, but the wind was dropping and the kites were coming down.

“Tell Marconi”, I whispered. “Let the audience hear them while they can and then finish the lecture”.

They shook their heads. “Impossible”, one whispered. “They are to come at the end. He would be furious if we interrupted him”.

“Let me do it then”, I said. But they would have none of it.

The lecture went on monotonously, and came to an end with the words: “We shall now listen to the signals coming across the Atlantic”. He turned to his assistants who were standing at the side of the auditorium. They shook their heads, sadly, and one said, “The kites are down”.

Marconi turned to the audience and explained that the failure of the wind had made the demonstration impossible. To me it sounded as if he were slightly pleased to be saved the trouble.

Walking out with Lord Rayleigh after the lecture, I said, “What did you think of it?”

“Well”, he replied, “I feel disposed to think that if you or I had required something for a lecture that would make a buzz- buzz we could have accomplished it with simpler apparatus — and we’d have had the buzz-buzz”.

* * *

The Woods now picked up Elizabeth and Robert, Jr., and sailed for home on the maiden trip of the Olympic, then the largest passenger steamer afloat.

After returning to America in 1911, and while continuing, of course, in his post at Johns Hopkins, Wood started a series of experiments with Professor Pickering of the Harvard Observatory on a new method of determining velocity of stars by photographing their spectra with an objective prism. These were very dramatic and involved the photography of entire groups of stars through a filter consisting of a glass cell filled with liquid — a solution of a chemical with the beautiful name of neodymium. This gave an additional absorption line in the spectrum of each star, from which calculations could be made of stellar velocities as stars approached or receded from the earth.

This was one of Wood’s great contributions to astrophysics, a subject in which he has figured prominently ever since. The Wood-Pickering procedure continues to be used as one of the standard methods of measuring stellar velocity — though Wood today has a new method brewing which Harlow Shapley and other prominent astronomers believe may supersede all previous systems.

In the summer of 1911, Wood purchased and mounted at East Hampton a parabolic mirror of sixteen-inch aperture and twenty-six-foot focus, which he had arranged in conjunction with a large coelostat lent by the Naval Observatory. The coelostat mirror, turned by clockwork, followed the moon and kept the reflected beam horizontal and directed against the sixteen-inch concave mirror, which in turn formed an image of the moon at its focus near the coelostat where the plateholder and ultraviolet filter were mounted. Young Professor Masamichi Kimura, of Tokyo, who ranks today among Japan’s greatest living scientists, had come over to study and work with Wood on sodium vapor, and was invited to East Hampton to help with the moon photography.

During their work a curious episode occurred. Kimura had been a welcome and popular house guest for a week end, and later was residing in a near-by hotel while they continued their summer experiments. One evening they’d been planning to photograph the moon with ultraviolet light. They had set up the telescope and mirrors in the late afternoon in a field clear of buildings, out beyond the barn, and Wood said, “Come over at eight o’clock”.

The sky was clear, but between six and seven a heavy pea- soup fog rolled in from the ocean. It was summertime, but the fog was cold as well as thick. The Woods, who had been dining early, saved after-dinner coffee for Kimura and expected him to appear at the house any minute. He did not appear. About nine o’clock the fog began to roll away, and the sky cleared. A blanket of it, however, as it sometimes does toward Montauk Point, lay thick, waist-deep on the ground. Wood waded through it toward the telescope, planning to do the photography alone. As he approached the looming shelters that covered the mirrors, he saw another dark object embedded in the fog. It was the head and shoulders of the Japanese, sphinxlike in the clear, with the rest of him up to his elbows in the murk.

“Gosh”, said Wood, “how long have you been here?”

Kimura took out his watch, consulted it in the moonlight, and said, “Hoh, have been here one hour and twenty-two minutes”.

Wood doesn’t guess at the answer. Kimura was an extremely intelligent and popular fellow, and knew from experience that he was always welcome at the fireside.

Not much came of these lunar experiments (says Wood), chiefly because of climatic conditions. Dew formed on the mirrors, the clock did not drive very steadily, and there were innumerable mosquitoes, who came from all directions to see what was going on. So later in the autumn through the courtesy of Professor H. N. Russell of Princeton University, I was given an opportunity of mounting my sixteen-inch mirror at the Princeton Observatory. Professor Harlow Shapley, now director of the Harvard Observatory, was then a fellow in astronomy at Princeton, and he assisted me in handling the telescope and making the exposures.

We made photographs of the full moon by orange, violet, and ultraviolet rays, the latter bringing out the dark deposit bordering the lunar crater Aristarchus with great distinctness, while the orange-ray picture showed no trace of it. Experiments showed that when a gray volcanic rock was treated at one spot by blowing a jet of sulphur vapor against it, a thin deposit of sulphur crystals was formed which was invisible to the eye but came out black in a photograph made with ultraviolet rays. It therefore seemed probable that an extensive deposit of sulphur had been found on the moon’s surface by the new photographic technique.

The plates obtained through the ray filters could be studied to advantage by the methods employed in the three-color process of color photography. The negative taken through the ultraviolet screen was printed on a gelatin film and stained blue, the violet and orange pictures being rendered in red and yellow respectively. The three films when superposed resulted in a very fine color photograph which brought out the differences in the reflecting power of the different dark areas on the moon in a very striking manner. The prevailing tone of the darker portions of the lunar surface was olive green, but certain spots came out with an orange tone and others with a decided purple color. The dark spot near Aristarchus came out deep blue, as was to be expected.

* * *

INFRARED LANDSCAPE: A 1911 photograph made by Wood of a summer landscape in Sicily – the earliest landscape photograph with infrared light ever made. Wood also pioneered in ultraviolet-light photography.

PEGOUD UPSIDE DOWN: Wood pirouettes in the snows of St.Moritz, in the constume he designed that won first prize at the fancy dress ball.

In 1911 Wood also continued his researches with mercury vapor and detected resonance radiation in the ultraviolet region, analogous to the sodium vapor resonance at the yellow lines. The thing of greatest interest was the invention of what he termed a resonance lamp.

A thin-walled bulb of fused quartz was blown, a drop of mercury placed in it, the air pumped out, and the bulb sealed. The mercury vapor in this vacuum bulb had sufficient density at room temperature to emit resonance radiation when illuminated by the light of a quartz mercury arc, operated with weak current at low temperature. The radiation was powerful enough to make a screen of barium platinocyanide glow with a yellow light, and if a drop of mercury was supported on a slightly warmed bit of glass between the screen and the resonance lamp, the vapor rising from the drop showed as a waving, fluttering column of black smoke on the yellow background. This made it possible to design an optical apparatus that would show the slightest traces of mercury vapor in the air of the room, a matter of importance in power plants where the engines are driven by the vapor of mercury instead of by steam. The vapor is very poisonous, and a very small leak in the high- pressure boiler or engine might exist undetected until the men showed symptoms of mercurial poisoning, by which time permanent damage would have been done. Several years later the General Electric research laboratory asked Wood to design apparatus for this purpose. He went to Schenectady with drawings, but they decided not to use it, as their chemical staff had prepared a paper that would turn black when exposed to the vapor. After getting along with this for several years, they found, according to report, that the paper was sluggish in its action, and might not respond to a sudden leak before a dangerous dose of the poison had been inhaled. One of the young men in the laboratory was then given the problem of making an optical detector along the lines suggested by Wood. After he had worked a year without results, Wood was consulted by an older member of the staff. It turned out that all that had been done was to try to detect the absorption of the vapor by the light of a high-pressure, high-temperature quartz arc. Wood pointed out the foolishness of this attempt, since practically no light capable of being absorbed by traces of the vapor is emitted by such a lamp, for it is all absorbed by the cooler layer of vapor surrounding the arc proper in the tube of the lamp. They were instructed to use a resonance lamp, or an arc operated at very low temperature, and within a year the papers were full of the “electric nose” for smelling mercury vapor in the air, developed by engineers of the General Electric Company. It was identical with Wood’s first suggestion, except that it was arranged to ring a bell, instead of showing the presence of the vapor by a difference of luminosity in the two halves of a circular phosphorescent screen, a mere matter of using a photoelectric cell and amplifiers.

In the early part of 1913, Wood was invited by Sir Oliver Lodge, chancellor of the University of Birmingham, England, to attend the annual meeting of the British Association in September — and to receive the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from the university.

As they were planning to take a second sabbatical year abroad at about this time, Wood accepted the invitation and went on ahead to England, while the rest of the family proceeded to Paris.

Sir Oliver Lodge was president of the British Association that year, and the meeting was the largest since 1904. Among others who were to be presented with LL.D.’s at the same meeting were Professor H. A. Lorentz and Madame Curie. In presenting Wood for the LL.D., Sir Oliver characterized him as “one of the most brilliant and original experimental physicists in the world”.

In his own address at the meeting, Wood described experiments with resonance spectra and amused the distinguished gathering with an account of his use of the family cat to clean the spectroscope. Nature, in reporting his speech, was even more glowing than Sir Oliver had been in his presentation. A little later Frederick Soddy, subsequently professor of inorganic chemistry at Oxford, referred to Wood in the same journal as “one of modern experimental research’s greatest masters”.

Wood still found time to enjoy himself. Before he left England, he went out to the great automobile race track at Brooklands for the races, where he also witnessed a stunt that set the aeronautical world agog. Pegoud, the French aviator, was to do his new and famous act in which he not only looped the loop “outside” as well as “inside”, but actually flew upside down for a quarter of a mile. “It was a lovely autumn day”, says Wood, “and the great stadium was packed. There came the hum of a motor high up in the air and we saw the tiny aeroplane with Pegoud’s helmeted head showing above the cockpit. A loop, another and another, and then the plane flying on a horizontal path, upside down with Pegoud’s inverted body hanging by the straps. The crowd of twenty thousand came to its feet with a gasp and a prolonged ‘A-a-ah.’ The plane dived again, turning over, and sailed along right side up with Pegoud now only a hundred feet above the ground waving to the cheering and shouting spectators”. Wood was tremendously pleased with the show, and later made amusing use of his impressions.

He joined his family in Paris, and they all spent the Christmas holidays again at St.-Moritz, stopping at the Kulm Hotel. Among the guests was a rich Rumanian, M. Stolojean, whose beautiful wife, Marna, was the daughter of Rumania’s War Minister, M. Filipesco.

Before dinner every night, M. Stolojean gave a cocktail party for his own group and invited the Woods. They got along famously. Marna, Wood says, wore a new dress and a new jewel every evening, and her husband had a pocketful of gold pieces, one of which he always left on the table after signing the card. There was bobsledding by day and dancing at night. The climax was to be a costume ball at Christmas. At lunch on the day of the ball Margaret asked her father whether he was planning to go and what he would wear.

I’ll let Wood tell the story, since it’s one he likes to remember.

I replied to Margaret, “I’m not going to pay a hundred francs to rent a harlequin pajama, or three hundred francs to be an Indian prince for a night”. But Margaret kept at me to go, and I finally said, “All right, I’ll come. I’ll come as Pegoud, upside down in an aeroplane”.

“Oh, marvelous, but how will you do it?”

“Well”, I said, “my head and shoulders will be in the pasteboard fuselage. Gnome motor and propeller in front, the wings supported by my extended arms, white gloves on my feet, and a huge Frenchman’s head, helmeted and goggled, and with a thick beard, all securely fastened on upside down on my behind”.

Gertrude said, “It won’t be funny, it’ll just look like you with a mask on your behind”. But I saw the picture in my mind’s eye, dashed down to the village, and bought yards of yellow cheesecloth, got an armful of thin bamboo sticks from my ski man and a lot of cardboard, and hurried back to the hotel. By forcing Gertrude, Margaret, and Elizabeth to sew vigorously all the afternoon, and gluing and painting cardboard myself, I had the whole contraption finished by six o’clock. It cost altogether less than three francs.

M. Stolojean came in to view it after the cocktails. He danced about in delight. “You shall have the first prize. Leave all to me”, he said. “I will arrange all; the floor shall be cleared after the fourth dance, you are to stay in my room until the band strikes up the Marseillaise, I will have a claque by the door, and there will be shouts of Il vient Pegoud! Vive Pegoud! Pegoud comes! and you tear across the hall and dance a pas seul!”

“Great”, I said. “I’ll do stunts, spirals, sideslips, everything”. We’d had some cocktails. “I’ll do my celebrated whirling dervish act, in which I spin for over a minute and then walk a chalk line”.

It came off exactly as planned, and there was tumultuous applause as I did a sideslip through the door, and shrieks of laughter as I turned and the face and beard came into view. With the band crashing the Marseillaise with an enthusiasm created by many gold pieces, and the huge waxed floor completely deserted, the walls packed with standing spectators, I did things I did not imagine possible in the way of stunts. That the illusion was fairly good, I found out the next morning when shown photographs, one of which appeared the next week in the London Sketch. Later I was able to dance with the ladies, for I had constructed the wings in such a way that I could wrap them around my partner, enveloping her in the manner of a bat doing a bunny hug with a white mouse. At the end of the party, the drum rolled for silence, and the master of ceremonies, a retired English colonel, arose to announce the prizes.

“This first prize, by unanimous vote of the committee”, he roared, “goes to Pegoud”. I folded my wings around my body, bowed, and was handed a white box, which when opened disclosed a full set of garnet sleeve links, studs, collar buttons, etc. Gertrude overheard in a group next morning, “Really, my dear Lady Mary, I don’t see why they gave the prize to Pegoud, because after all it wasn’t Pegoud at all, and besides it wasn’t a pretty costume”.

* * *

Wood never brags of his great scientific achievements, but is vain as a child concerning triumphs of that sort.

He returned, with his family, to Paris, finished up his research, and sailed for home in June, 1914.

One day Wood met Oliver Herford in the Players Club, and Herford said, grinning, “Come along and have lunch and I’ll promise not to autograph any more of your funny books”.

Wood had turned aside from science, as Lewis Carroll did, to perpetuate “a revised manual of flornithology for beginners”, entitled How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers. It had got off to a bad start in 1907 — then suddenly was all over the place — and a lot of people later attributed it to Herford, saying that only Herford could have written it. Dr. Wood had written it for his own amusement, to spoof the public and as a book to end all books on botany written for children by the mushy male and female nature-fakers of the period. It was done with jingles, woodcuts of his own drawings, and appalling puns. It began by explaining how to tell the difference between the crow and the crocus, the catbird and the catnip, the clover and the plover, the quail and the kale, the roc and the shamrock — then invaded the piscatorial and animal kingdoms to treat of the ape and the grape, the pansy and chimpanzee, the puss and octo-pus, the cow and the cowry.

It had appeared under the imprint of Paul Elder & Co., and Elder hadn’t succeeded in making it go. “None of the bookshops would stock it when approached by Elder’s salesmen (if he had any)”, says Wood. “Boston’s largest bookshop reluctantly took six copies, on consignment. A few weeks later they ordered five hundred”. It was super-nonsense and had begun to catch on by word of mouth. Then the Sunday supplements began splurging its cuckoo drawings — and all of a sudden it was going like wildfire.

Wood sent President Theodore Roosevelt an autographed copy of Birds and Flowers at a time when he was being violently attacked as a “nature-faker” by a certain Reverend Long. Wood wrote on his flyleaf, “I am venturing to send you a remark-proof copy of my current Nature book, which I trust will fill a Long-felt want”. Roosevelt sent a cordial acknowledgment, and asked to see more of Wood’s writings. So Wood sent him a copy of Physical Optics!

And who, wondered children and grownups, was this Robert Williams Wood? If they’d ever heard of a famous professor of physics by that name — which most of them hadn’t — it didn’t occur to them to connect the names…

Wood is no shrinking violet, and one night the story that Herford had written it got in his hair. It was at a dinner party in Washington. Someone chanced to quote from the book, and the man sitting opposite said, “Oh, yes, that’s from the Birds and Flowers thing by Herford”.

Wood said, “I beg your pardon, but Herford didn’t write it”.

“Well, I happen to know he did”, said the man a bit truculently. “You see, Oliver Herford happens to be a friend of mine”.

“I can’t help that”, insisted Wood, “but I tell you he didn’t write it”.

“What makes you so sure he didn’t?”

“Because I wrote it myself!” Wood exploded. “And then”, says Wood, recalling the episode, “he knew I was lying”.

How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers is now in its nineteenth edition and still going strong.

Reproduced from How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers by Robert Williams Wood with permission of the publishers, Dodd, Mead and Company.

You might think this one alarming if successful excursion in the field of popular authorship would have been enough for any busy laboratory scientist — but not for Wood! He was infected. It’s like malaria and danghi. The bug had bitten him, and by early 1914 he was being an author again in his misguided moments, with results which were equally extraordinary, in their different way… for the scandalous genealogical truth, stemming down from the Verne-Wells family tree, is that Wood was the American grandfather and Arthur Train the grandmother of the present flood of pseudo-scientific fiction which fills the pulp magazines and sometimes the slicks with interstellar catastrophes and journeys in moon rockets — and the comics with Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.

Back in 1914 Arthur Train was spending the summer at East Hampton, and dropped in frequently to see Wood, in the barn laboratory. They were both Jules Verne addicts, and one day Wood said to him, “I’ve got a swell plot for a story”. He sketched the outline of a tale in which, during the middle of a world war, messages come from a mysterious unknown wireless station warning the powers that unless they stop the war the sender, who signs himself “Pax”, will shift the orientation of the earth’s axis by the aid of his disintegrating ray and atomic power and cause a second Ice Age in which all northern Europe will be covered by glaciers and destroyed. Regarded as a harmless crank, “Pax” finally broadcasts a message that, to show his power, he will, on the twelfth of March at noon, lengthen the day by five minutes. The time arrives, and what happens is described by a common citizen sitting in Central Park contemplating the obelisk.

There is a godawful thundering rumble, the ground quivers, the obelisk crashes to earth, and the skyscrapers sway back and forth. Newspaper extras report terrific earthquakes all over the world, and next morning dispatches from the Greenwich and other observatories report that the stars are two and a half minutes late in crossing the meridian. Later dispatches state that the period of the earth’s rotation has been increased by three minutes.

Reproduced from How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers by Robert Williams Wood with permission of the publishers, Dodd, Mead and Company.

Then comes the episode of a “relay” gun that shells Paris from a distance of seventy miles. This was three years before the Big Bertha. Presently a “flying ring” driven by atomic power in rocket form roars over Europe, directing its rays against the ground, which is torn to bits. Crossing the Mediterranean, it causes a tidal wave that swamps everything in its path.

The mad pacifist genius is finally located in Labrador by Professor Benjamin Hooker, a young Harvard physicist (Wood himself, of course, romanticized), who discovers the secret of the disintegrating ray. Uranium ore was the key to it, which was curiously prophetic, in the best Jules Verne tradition, of the present experiments with neutron rays generating atomic power from uranium. Hooker is rescued and aided by a famous and daring young aviator named Burke, and together they bring about the destruction of the earth-destroying plot. If I recall correctly, “Pax” blew himself up by overloading his disintegrator.

“Arthur Train was enthusiastic”, says Wood, “but we worried for days about the title. Then one morning I said to him, “I’ve got it! The Man Who Rocked the Earth”.

The story was written speedily in collaboration. Wood wrote the scientific and pseudoscientific passages and worked on the mechanical plot, while Train took care of the “literary” and human-interest elements. It ran serially in the Saturday Evening Post, and was published as a book by Doubleday, Page & Company in 1915. The title page acknowledges the joint authorship, but Wood was sore (and small blame to him) because they left his name off the gilt-lettered cover. He promptly complained, and Doubleday, Page made a handsome if hollow apology. They told the poor prof a pretty bedtime story. The omission was due, they wrote — and were so sorry — “to a clerical error”!

Presently, nevertheless, and despite some bickering over the division of the spoils, Wood and Train went into a similar collaboration on a sequel entitled The Moon-Maker, which was published serially by Cosmopolitan. A comet collides with an asteroid, knocks the latter out of its orbit, and sends it hurtling through space, so that it is presently going to hit Texas and destroy the world. Now who can better save the world than the bright young physicist (romanticized as Hooker in the former book), with the help of the daring young flyer named Burke? For, you see, they had learned in the previous opus to operate the “flying ring” and shoot the works. The ring is a sort of superrocket propelled by atomatic energy and armed with rays which can explode the asteroid or knock it for a series of loops. They had everything it took — except a heroine. If this had been going to take place in interstellar space exclusively, they might not have needed a heroine, but since they were concerned with its occurring also in Hearst’s Cosmopolitan, a heroine was essential. So Wood and Train invented a beautiful young lady named Rhoda Gibbs. She begins honestly enough as a precocious young mathematical assistant, but ends up as a stowaway “staff photographer” when the “flying ring” takes off — and to thicken the soup, Professor Hooker has fallen in love with her!

Hooker, Burke, another scientific guy thrown in for good measure, and the beautiful Rhoda presently take off and land to refuel on the moon, where she makes wonderful moon- landscape pictures. Later they meet and combat the asteroid. They partially explode it and drive it into an orbit in which it peacefully revolves around the earth — preventing our destruction and giving us a nice additional new moon!

It was in the bag, heroine, climax, check coming up from Cosmopolitan, and everything, and you might suppose that at this point our scientist astray as an author might have gone back into the Johns Hopkins laboratories and sat down. But not Wood!

While Train was polishing off Rhoda, Dr. Wood conceived the additional fantastic idea of illustrating this modem Jules Verne romance by concocting an actual set of photographs, as supposedly taken by the beautiful heroine. Train and the staff of Cosmopolitan were entranced by the idea, so Wood went to work in his East Hampton barn. He made plasticine models, did tricks with charcoal drawings and light, stole a croquet ball from the family set and painted it to represent the receding earth as seen through the camera lens of the departing Rhoda. He photographed it, as Rhoda would have had to do, through an infrared screen on a panchromatic plate. He modeled and photographed lunar landscapes, illuminated by oblique sunlight, showing the circular craters and volcanic peaks with their long shadows. When he wanted to show Burke or Rhoda walking in the foreground, in helmet, with oxygen tank, etc., he did it by using pictures of deep-sea divers in armor, cut from magazines. One really beautiful picture shows the “ring” high in the air with its blazing rocket tail over the lunar landscape. The sky in these photographs is inky black and studded with stars. The moon has no atmosphere and therefore no blue sky. He did ingenious photographs of the attack and partial destruction of the asteroid by the disintegrating ray, as if made through the window of the “flying ring”, as well as photographs of the collision of the comet and the asteroid taken through the great telescope on Mount Wilson, perfectly beautiful and scientifically accurate fakes.

Alas and alack, however, when the finished photos were shown to the editor in chief of Cosmopolitan, he threw up his hands in dismay and said, “I suppose they’re wonderful in their way — but they’re too wonderful — in their way, which is not our way. They’d make Cosmopolitan look like a copy of Popular Mechanics!”

Dr. Wood wants me not only to admire but to sympathize with his struggles, triumphs, and frustrations in the field of popular authorship. I can admire him and even envy him but I can’t see that he needs sympathy. Birds and Flowers now answers itself. Everybody knows he wrote it, and it’s doing fine. His name didn’t appear in gilt letters on the cover of The Man Who Rocked the Earth. He got only $300 for his part in its serialization, and Cosmopolitan refused to use his photos in the sequel… So what?

I honestly don’t believe it has ever occurred to the man that he was not only the creative originator, but the (thinly disguised) hero of both latter books, and that if they chance to survive the welter of interstellar pulp, he’ll cash in posthumously on his prophecies (as Jules Verne did long after he was dead), despite the fact that his name didn’t appear in gilt letters, through a “clerical error”!

It’s sad enough when we read that treatment of this sort turned Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith testy. When it happens to Wood, who innocently “strayed” into poetic and literary fields, I suppose I should break down and cry — but I don’t. I’ll be damned if I’ll sympathize with any amateur author whose poetry ran into nineteen editions and whose pseudoscientific sensations were published in the biggest popular magazines in America.

While Wood was in Europe, in the autumn of 1913, he was invited to become a member of the Solvay Conference of the International Physical Institute which was meeting in Brussels. There were present about thirty eminent scientists, among them Einstein, Sir James Jeans, Lindeman, Rutherford, Rubens, Langevin — and Madame Curie. Madame Curie was the only woman, and at the opening of the congress she requested that the others refrain from smoking, as she disliked the smell of tobacco. Since the Institute had provided for each member a box of Havana cigars, her request was unpopular. At the second session, Wood (having meanwhile plotted with Professor Jeans) took out his pipe and lit it. Jeans followed suit, then one by one the other members helped themselves to cigars. Wood says Madame Curie rose, gathered her papers, and departed.

At about this time Wood bought by chance a little headphone radio — or “wireless receiving set” as it was called in those days. The day when they’d bring voices and music and be a fixture in every home was still in the far distant future. There was nothing to pick up from the Eiffel Tower station, or from anywhere, except Morse code. Nobody had receiving sets except cranks and scientists. How Wood acquired one, learned code, kept the gadget, brought it home to America, and “tuned in” privately on the World War before either the public or the newspapers got it can best be told in his own words.

Sheep in wolves’ clothing” is the name Wood applied to himself and other professors and scientists who were given commissions and uniforms in the World War. Long before we entered it, he’d been helping the War Department with technical advice, and he kept trying in vain to get his friend General Squier, Chief Signal Officer of our Army, to give him a commission and send him overseas. Then came a cable from Paris to the State Department, rubber-stamped by Prime Minister Ribot, requesting that Wood be commissioned and sent to Paris to work in collaboration with the French scientific group that formed the Bureau of Inventions.

“I was in East Hampton at the time”, said Wood, and though I (the biographer) have taken two or three shots at trying to tell what happened next, I think it’s best and safest to let him go on telling it in his own way.

Wood’ s fiftieth birthday had occurred in the year of the armistice. The years which followed saw him entering an era of speeded-up activities, scientific and social, which would have left most younger men out of breath and panting.

He detests the word “social” and “society”, but this petulance doesn’t alter the fact that he and the whole family have always loved parties and gaiety. By 1918 they had become international cosmopolites, shuttling in the summertime from great country houses in England to Paris and Brittany, to St.-Jean-de-Luz, to St.-Moritz in winter, playing with the most dazzling playboys and playgirls of the period as well as consorting with fellow-celebrities in Wood’s own world of science.

A complete record of the Wood family’s ocean trips, parties, visits to Aix-les-Bains, Baden-Baden, Biarritz, Venice, and the Lido during the twenties and thirties would give the false impression that Wood himself was an international playboy. Yet it was during these same years that he conducted many of his most important researches and made some of his greatest contributions to science. The man is definitely a hyperkinetic, yet never burns out his fuses.

Wood was no sooner out of the army and back in Baltimore than he took up his work with sodium where he had left off before the war. In 1919 he announced the discovery that thin films of metallic sodium and potassium, condensed on the inner surface of fused quartz bulbs at liquid-air temperature, while so opaque to light that the sun was invisible through them, were transparent to the entire range of the ultraviolet as far as wave length 2,000. The discovery was of considerable importance in connection with the new theory of the optical properties of metals. At the same time Wood became interested in the mystery of the hydrogen spectrum — the fact that while all terrestrial sources of luminous hydrogen gave spectra with only eight of the so-called Balmer series of lines, the spectra of the sun’s chromosphere and many stars showed thirty-three members of the series. The result of his investigation is such a good example of how research in pure science can have immediate practical importance that I let him tell it himself.

In the weird Wood guest book at East Hampton is a drawing made by Ambrose Lansing, curator of Egyptology at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It is only slightly Egyptian. It is a burlesque of Wood’s own Animal Analogues, and is entitled “The Wood and the Woodchuck”. It depicts the woodchuck stealing lettuce from a cold frame not unlike a museum case, and the Wood similarly engaged in purloining the famous purple-gold sequins of King Tutankhamen from their case in the Cairo Museum.

“A joke’s a joke”, said Dr. Wood, “but after all we didn’t steal the purple sequins. You might say we abstracted them with the connivance of the Curator. You might even say, if it gives you more fun to put me always in the worst possible light, that we surreptitiously abstracted them, but — ”

“Did Curator Engelbach of the Cairo Museum say, or didn’t he”, I interrupted,” ‘For God’s sake keep it secret until you get out of the country, and on no account let Howard Carter know’?”

“I don’t think he said ‘for God’s sake,’” Dr. Wood replied, “and the only reason we didn’t want Carter to know was that we didn’t want to enrage him. After all, he was the one who had dug the stuff up. He fancied himself as a sort of sole executor and publicity agent for King Tut, and had never tolerated others cutting in on it”.

“All right”, I agreed, “you didn’t purloin them. I’ll let you tell in your own way in a minute exactly how you did obtain their — shall we call it? — temporary legitimate possession”.

Dr. Wood had become interested in the purple gold while on a visit to Egypt in 1931 with Mrs. Wood, traveling with Ambrose Lansing and his wife, Caroline, who were going to Cairo to superintend excavations at Lisht. It presented a mystery which Egyptologists, metallurgic chemists, and modern goldsmiths had been unable to solve. They hadn’t even been able to agree on the nature of the problem. A dispute had arisen since the discovery as to whether the purple gold was the product of an art known to King Tutankhamen’s goldsmith and subsequently lost for over three thousand years or was due to chemical changes resulting from long burial.

When Wood heard all this and saw the actual ornaments, all rose and red and purple, his scientific detective instincts were challenged, and I suspect also that his ubiquitous cat curiosity was involved in the subsequent events for more than a little. The problem, as a matter of fact, was a fascinating one for anybody. In the meantime Lansing had arranged with the authorities that the Woods were to receive all the privileges extended to archaeologists. Many of the smaller gold ornaments from the tomb were covered with a rose-purple film, quite unlike anything that had ever been observed on gold jewelry or coins either ancient or modern.

Wood leaned almost immediately to the theory that the purple sequins were the result of art rather than chemical accident. He noted the resemblance of the colors to those of certain gold films which he had prepared many years before when engaged in the study of the optical properties of very finely divided metallic granules, and felt sure that they had been produced at the time of manufacture, for on one of the king’s slippers small purple-gold rosettes and yellow-gold bars had been sewn in alternation, making a color pattern. There was, however, the possibility that the rosettes and bars had been made by different goldsmiths, with metal from different localities, one sample containing an impurity which slowly oxidized during the centuries, forming the purple film.

The objects on which the colored film appeared were small ornaments exclusively, sequins — some in the form of flowers from 1.5 to 2 cm. in diameter and others circular concave disks — which ornamented the ceremonial robe of the king, and a number of pendants and other head ornaments, on some of which the colors were extremely brilliant, ranging from a rich red to purple and violet.

Wood made a careful examination of the gold ornaments from other tombs displayed in the Cairo Museum, but found nothing resembling the Tutankhamen gold with the exception of a queen’s crown from the next dynasty, which was decorated with gold flowers showing the purple film in many places. This made it seem possible that the secret of the coloring process had been handed down from father to son, but had finally been lost.

So this all made a pretty problem. Said Wood to himself and to Lansing, and to their friend A. Lucas, who was British Chief Chemist for the Department of Antiquities in Egypt, “I believe I could rediscover the secret — if I could get hold of some of the ornaments”.

Lucas was for it, but it wasn’t going to be easy. Howard Carter wasn’t going to be eager to lend them to an itinerant American professor who wasn’t even an Egyptologist to play with. And they were all locked up and screwed down in their museum case in Cairo.

“The only thing we can do”, said Lucas, “is to get the consent of the Curator”.

When the plot was disclosed to Curator Engelbach, he agreed in the interest of science, but concurred emphatically — with or without the “for God’s sake” — when Lucas said, “We’ll have to keep this secret. No sense ever to let Howard Carter know — unless you succeed with the experiments”.

MOONSHINE: One of the photographs Wood faked for illustrating The Moon-Maker, the pseudo-scientific “thriller” on which he and Arthur Train collaborated. The “flying ring” is taking off from the surface of the moon.

MAJOR WOOD: Wood is testing the “flash telescope,” which he originally constructed from an old piece of stovepipe and other discarded parts, and which was the first device offered by the Science and Research Division actually put into production for overseas use in the A.E.F.

It wasn’t merely Howard Carter’s private vanity. If the government learned that Wood was trying to take out any of the sequins, he would be searched at the customs house until they were recovered, and Carter would raise public hell — not about “purloining”, but about the proposed unauthorized investigation.

What they did next, I’m letting Wood tell in his own way.

After Lucas had persuaded the Curator, the three of us went to the museum hall accompanied by two uniformed guards who had two separate sets of keys. While popeyed tourists stood around, they opened six separate padlocks and were then compelled to take out about a dozen screws which held down the glass. When the case was opened the Curator whispered to me to pick out what I wanted. I began picking sequins, with continual side glances at the Curator, watching for raised eyebrows. At the eighth, I saw symptoms and said, “Thank you very much, these will suffice”. I had been picking them out with my right hand and holding them in my left. The Curator said sternly and aloud, doubtless to reassure the pop- eyed tourists or perhaps his own guards, “Now give them to me”. He was a sleight-of-hand artist and slipped them back to me before we left the museum.

* * *

The archconspirator had scarcely returned to his hotel when a note was brought to him — from Howard Carter! It turned out, however, as coincidences happily often do, to be merely an invitation to visit the great Egyptologist in his laboratory headquarters in one of the old tombs, in the Valley of the Kings. Wood bearded the lion, and says, “I felt like the boy who’d almost been caught stealing the apples… but at the same time felt a temptation to tell him I had the sequins”.

How Wood found the lost secret of the purple gold, beginning there in Cairo with his wife’s nail polish and ending in the Johns Hopkins laboratories with a series of experiments as strange as any you’ll find in fictional scientific detection, is today a brilliant page in the history of Egyptology and of chemical-physical research. He not only rediscovered the ancient method and proved that the coloring was no accident due to chemical changes, burial, and time, but succeeded in reproducing, by a finally simple technique such as might easily have been known to goldsmiths three thousand years ago, all the gorgeous colors, ranging from roseate dawn pink through rich red, purple, and violet. Here in his own clear words is the story step by step.

My first problem (he explains) was to ascertain whether the colors were simple “interference” effects of thin films (soap-bubble colors) or due to some “resonance” action of minute particles covering the gold surface. This was purely a problem in physical optics. Since interference requires the cooperation of two streams of light reflected from the opposed surfaces of a thin film, the first step in the study appeared to be to destroy the reflection from the outer surface by covering it with a transparent varnish. This experiment I tried in Cairo, employing my wife’s nail polish, the only available material of the desired nature. The color was not destroyed, as it would have been in the case of an interference color, and after the celluloid had become dry, I found that it could be peeled off, carrying the film with it and leaving the underlying gold bright yellow. The film, however, now showed no color, either by transmitted or reflected light. This was as far as I could go at the time, but on my return to my laboratory in Baltimore I deposited metallic gold on the back of the film by cathodic sputtering and found that the purple reflection was restored. These two experiments appeared to show conclusively that we were dealing with something more complicated than simple thin film interference.

The next step was to ascertain the nature of the film. This was done by placing a bit of the celluloid film carrying the film from the sequin between two electrodes of pure gold and photographing the spectrum of a very brief spark discharge. Iron lines were found in the spectrum. A purple sequin was then hung on a very fine glass thread between the poles of an electromagnet, and when the current was turned on, it was drawn to one of the pole pieces. One of the yellow bars from the slipper was thrown out of the magnetic field, showing that it contained no iron, while one of the small purple rosettes was attracted. These two specimens were returned to the museum, as they were needed for the reconstruction of the slipper. They had served their purpose, however, in showing that the purple rosettes contained iron, while the yellow bars were free from it. It was now necessary to find out how the film, presumably iron oxide, had been formed, and whether it was intentionally produced or was an accidental patina resulting from time.

I prepared an alloy of pure gold and a very small fraction of 1 per cent of iron, hammered the bead into the form of a disk, and heated it over a very minute flame. At a temperature a little below a dull red heat a beautiful purple film formed, matching the color of the sequins almost exactly. As I could not ascertain the effect of three thousand years of exposure to the air on one of my alloy plates, I was obliged to look for other evidence that the color was produced by the heat process. I removed the purple film from a small piece of one of the sequins by nitromuriatic acid and examined the gold with the microscope. The surface had been etched by the acid and showed a very marked crystalline structure. A similar treatment of one of my replicas revealed the same crystalline structure, which was not shown by specimens which had not been heated to a high temperature after the hammering process. Pure gold rolled into a thin plate between steel rollers shows only very minute crystals when etched, but if heated shows crystals of exactly the same size and character as those found in the Egyptian sequins. This was proof number one that the sequins had been heated after their manufacture.

Proof number two came as a result of an investigation of another surface characteristic of the sequins, the invariable, presence of minute metal globules of gold which stood up in high relief on both sides of the sequins. Obviously these must have been formed after the ornaments had been hammered or rolled into shape, and one or two had the form of minute mushroom buds, a globule supported on a short stem. This suggested that they had been exuded or excreted by the metal, by a process similar to that which occurs when a silver bead is heated on charcoal by the blowpipe flame, the phenomenon referred to as the “spitting of silver”. It results from the liberation of dissolved gas at the moment of solidification of the globule. I was unable to find any allusion to a similar performance by gold and for some time was unable to produce the globules on my replicas.

The solution of the problem came in a rather fantastic way. I had made spark spectra of the purple sequins and found practically no lines save those of gold and iron, the latter being quite strong. A more careful scrutiny revealed a few very faint lines which could not be attributed to either metal, and two of these I attributed to arsenic. I next heated a small fragment of one of the sequins in a small tube of fused quartz to a temperature considerably above the melting-point of the gold in a very slow stream of hydrogen, and found a deposit on the wall of the tube beyond the heated portion, a yellow and a black ring, the latter on the side away from the gold. I therefore suspected the presence of sulphur and arsenic, and native sulphide of arsenic (the yellow pigment orpiment) was in fact imported into Egypt during the Eighteenth Dynasty and used in tomb decorations. This suggested that the royal goldsmith had perhaps tried the experiment of fusing gold with the yellow pigment in the hope of improving the color or of getting more gold. I wrote to Mr. Lucas asking for a few minute scrapings of this material, and he sent me some small lumps that had been found in a cloth bag in the tomb of Tutankhamen. I fused a small speck of this substance wrapped up in a pellet of thin gold plate, and as the fused globule solidified it “spit” out a small globule exactly as silver does. But a thin plate hammered from this globule and then heated showed no trace of further “spitting”.

It was now obvious that the gold and orpiment would have to be melted together and solidified under pressure to obtain a specimen that would “spit” after being fashioned into a plate by hammering or rolling. I accordingly heated the two in a small sealed tube of fused quartz, melting the gold down to a round globule. Some of the sulphur and arsenic was liberated as vapor under pressure and glowed bright red in the non- luminous tube (for quartz radiates practically no light even at very high temperatures). After cooling, the tube was opened and a plate hammered and rolled from the globule. When heated to a dull red heat the plate grew a marvelous crop of metal mushrooms.

This suggested that the necessary pressure required for keeping sufficient arsenic and sulphur in the gold to produce “spitting” may have resulted from the fusion of a considerable mass in a crucible, for we know from the bas-reliefs at Saqqara that the Egyptians used furnaces operated by air blasts from human lungs. But there was another and more probable alternative, namely, that the sequins had been fashioned from native gold nuggets which contained a trace of iron as an impurity. These, having been originally formed deep in the earth and under pressure, might easily contain sulphides, arsenates, or similar gas-producing compounds in sufficient quantity to produce the small amount of “spitting” shown by the sequins.

A number of plates were therefore hammered from small nuggets of native gold from various localities, and most of them showed the excretion of minute globules when heated to a dull red. None of these showed any trace of the purple film, however, and I wrote to Mr. Lucas asking for specimens of native Egyptian gold. The single specimen which he sent gave globules, but no purple film. This gold was, however, embedded in quartz, and unsuitable for immediate fashioning into ornaments. Alluvial gold may very probably have been imported from Abyssinia, where the placer deposits are still worked, and it would be extremely interesting to see whether the purple color would appear on plates hammered from nuggets from this or from other possible sources of ancient Egyptian gold. On the whole, I favored the theory that the sequins were hammered from nuggets of native gold containing a trace of iron, one of which was accidentally dropped into a fire, or perhaps heated for annealing, with the resulting discovery of the purple color.

A complete survey of the gold deposits of Abyssinia was under way in 1932, and I wrote to Mr. E. A. Colson, president of the Bank of Addis Ababa, asking for small nuggets from different localities. These he mailed to me from time to time, and all yielded globules, but none the purple film. I had explained to him that should a sample ever be found containing iron it might prove to be a valuable clue in locating the rich deposits worked in ancient times. Mussolini, however, stopped the game just as it was getting under way, and Mr. Colson died shortly after.

* * *

Some of the sequins made by Dr. Wood are now in the Cairo Museum along with the originals. His solution of the mystery is embalmed in the British Journal of Egyptian Archaeology and in the archives of the Egypt Exploration Society.

Dr. Wood has had a long career, dating back beyond the days of Blondlot’s “N rays” and the American visit of Eusapia Palladino, in the exposure of frauds and delusions, whether emanating from supposedly scientific laboratories or from mediumistic cabinets.

In the investigation of doubtful phenomena, he is neither academic nor tame nor conventional. In the case of the famous “N ray”, he made a trip to the University of Nancy, and dramatically exposed the most extraordinary scientific delusion of modern times. When Grindell Matthews came over from England with his “death ray” and was trying to induce our government to buy it for the navy, the Associated Press asked Wood to look into it. Wood “looked into it” and gave the press a scathing broadside in which he compared Matthews, “whether self-deluded or not”, to “promotors who try to sell Brooklyn bridges to innocent bystanders”.

In the Palladino investigation, in which he was a member of the committee appointed under the auspices of the Scientific American, he employed X rays and also an ingenious “Venetian-blind” arrangement by which the floor of the medium’s cabinet was illuminated without her knowledge. In the later case of Margery, the Harvard-investigated medium, he seized hold of and pinched — her ectoplasm!

In Wood’s opinion, these scientific leaders up false alleys divide sharply into two categories — self-deluded cranks and downright frauds. The former honestly imagine they have an idea and can make a fortune for themselves and others if they get the backing. The impostors usually set up a tiny but elaborate apparatus worked by trickery, with the hope of impressing some gullible capitalist who might advance them a lot of money to carry out the “idea” on a grander scale. Both categories are old as the hills and perennial as the daisies. Last summer Wood was being urged to investigate a man who claimed he could run a farm tractor by wireless power, with waves from a station a hundred miles distant. He also, of course, had a “death ray”. They always have “death rays”. He had a promotor who’d been pestering the great physicist, and who insisted he had seen a duck brought down from an elevation of eight hundred feet.

“Investigating such people”, said Wood, “is often amusing, but generally a waste of time. The bigger, more serious cases are different”,

Here is Wood’s own account of what was probably the greatest scientific delusion of our time.

In the late autumn of 1903, Professor R. Blondlot, head of the Department of Physics at the University of Nancy, member of the French Academy, and widely known as an investigator, announced the discovery of a new ray, which he called N ray, with properties far transcending those of the X rays. Reading of his remarkable experiments with these rays in the Comptes rendus of the Academy, the leading scientific journal of France, I attempted to repeat his observations, but failed to confirm them after wasting a whole morning. According to Blondlot, the rays were given off spontaneously by many metals. A piece of paper, very feebly illuminated, could be used as a detector, for, wonder of wonders, when the N rays fell upon the eye they increased its ability to see objects in a nearly dark room.

The flame of discovery kindled by Blondlot was now burning brightly, and fuel was added by a score of other investigators. Twelve papers had appeared in the Comptes rendus before the year was out. A. Charpentier, famous for his fantastic experiments on hypnotism, claimed that N rays were given off by muscle, nerves, and the brain, and his incredible claims were published in the Comptes, sponsored by the great Arsonval, France’s foremost authority on electricity and magnetism.

Blondlot next announced that he had constructed a spectroscope with aluminum lenses and a prism of the same metal, and found a spectrum of lines separated by dark intervals, showing that there were N rays of different refrangibility and wave length. He measured the wave lengths. The flame of N-ray research was now a conflagration. Jean Becquerel, son of Henri Becquerel, whose discovery of the rays from uranium had laid the foundation for the discovery of radium by the Curies, claimed that N rays could be transmitted over a wire, just as light can be transmitted along the inside of a bent glass rod by internal reflection. One end of a wire near the faintly luminous detector caused variation of its intensity as the other end, some meters away, was passed over the skull of a living person. If the subject was anesthetized with ether, the N rays from the brain first increased and then decreased as the sleep deepened. He claimed that metals could be anesthetized with ether, chloroform, or alcohol, in which condition they ceased to emit or transmit the rays. Biologists, physiologists, psychologists, chemists, botanists, and geologists climbed on the band wagon. The nerve centers of the spinal cord in their relation to disease and previous surgical operations were studied by the N rays which they emitted. The rays were given off by growing plants, vegetables, and even by a human corpse. Charpentier found the senses of hearing and smell were increased by N rays as well as the sense of sight. A tuning fork in vibration gave a powerful N ray. By early summer Blondlot had published twenty papers, Charpentier twenty, and J. Becquerel ten, all describing new properties and sources of the rays.

Nearly one hundred papers on N rays were published in the Comptes rendus in the first half of the year 1904. The N ray was polarized, magnetized, hypnotized, and tortured in all of the ways that had forced confessions from light rays — but only Frenchmen could observe the phenomena. Scientists in all other countries were frankly skeptical, in fact ridiculed these fantastic impossibilities. But the French Academy stamped Blondlot’s work with its approval by awarding him the Lalande prize of 20,000 francs and its gold medal “for the discovery of the N rays”.

During that summer we were at Beg-Meil, in Brittany, and I was out of touch with the scientific high jinks in Nancy, but in September I went over to Cambridge for the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. After the meeting some of us got together for a discussion of what was to be done about the N rays. Of our group, Professor Rubens of Berlin, with whom I had come in close contact while a student, was most outspoken in his denunciation. He felt particularly aggrieved because the Kaiser had commanded him to come to Potsdam and demonstrate the rays. After wasting two weeks in vain efforts to duplicate the Frenchman’s experiments, he was greatly embarrassed by having to confess to the Kaiser his failure. Turning to me he said, “Professor Wood, will you not go to Nancy immediately and test the experiments that are going on there?” “Yes, yes”, said all of the Englishmen, “that’s the idea, go ahead”. I suggested that Rubens go, as he was the chief victim, but he said that Blondlot had been most polite in answering his many letters asking for more detailed information, and it would not look well if he undertook to expose him. “Besides”, he added, “you are an American, and you Americans can do anything…”.

So I visited Nancy before rejoining my family in Paris, meeting Blondlot by appointment at his laboratory in the early evening. He spoke no English, and I elected German as our means of communication, as I wanted him to feel free to speak confidentially to his assistant, who was apparently a sort of high-class laboratory janitor.

He first showed me a card on which some circles had been painted in luminous paint. He turned down the gas light and called my attention to their increased luminosity when the N ray was turned on. I said that I saw no change. He said that was because my eyes were not sensitive enough, so that proved nothing. I asked him if I could move an opaque lead screen in and out of the path of the rays while he called out the fluctuations of the screen. He was almost 100 per cent wrong and called out fluctuations when I made no movement at all, and that proved a lot, but I held my tongue. He then showed me the dimly lighted clock, and tried to convince me that he could see the hands when he held a large flat file just above his eyes. I asked if I could hold the file, for I had noticed a flat wooden ruler on his desk, and remembered that wood was one of the few substances that never emitted N rays. He agreed to this, and I felt around in the dark for the ruler and held it in front of his face. Oh, yes, he could see the hands perfectly. This also proved something.

But the crucial and most exciting test was now to come. Accompanied by the assistant, who by this time was casting rather hostile glances at me, we went into the room where the spectroscope with the aluminum lenses and prism was installed. In place of an eyepiece, this instrument had a vertical thread, painted with luminous paint, which could be moved along in the region where the N-ray spectrum was supposed to be by turning a wheel having graduations and numerals on its rim. This wheel turned a horizontal screw with a movable nut on which the thread was mounted. Blondlot took a seat in front of the instrument and slowly turned the wheel. The thread was supposed to brighten as it crossed the invisible lines of the N-ray spectrum. He read off the numbers on the graduated scale for a number of the lines, by the light of a small, darkroom, red lantern. This experiment had convinced a number of skeptical visitors, as he could repeat his measurements in their presence, always getting the same numbers. He claimed that a movement of the thread of 0.1 mm. was sufficient to change the luminosity, and when I said that seemed impossible, as the slit of the spectroscope was 2 mm. wide, he said that was one of the inexplicable properties of the N rays. I asked him to repeat his measurements, and reached over in the dark and lifted the aluminum prism from the spectroscope. He turned the wheel again, reading off the same numbers as before. I put the prism back before the lights were turned up, and Blondlot told his assistant that his eyes were tired. The assistant had evidently become suspicious, and asked Blondlot to let him repeat the reading for me. Before he turned down the light I had noticed that he placed the prism very exactly on its little round support, with two of its corners exactly on the rim of the metal disk. As soon as the light was lowered, I moved over towards the prism, with audible footsteps, but I did not touch the prism. The assistant commenced to turn the wheel, and suddenly said hurriedly to Blondlot in French, “I see nothing; there is no spectrum. I think the American has made some derangement”. Whereupon he immediately turned up the gas and went over and examined the prism carefully. He glared at me, but I gave no indication of my reactions. This ended the séance, and I caught the night train for Paris.

Next morning I sent off a letter to Nature, London’s scientific weekly, giving a full account of my findings, not, however, mentioning the double-crossing incident at the end of the evening and merely locating the laboratory as “one in which most of the N-ray experiments had been carried on”. La Revue scientifique”, France’s weekly semipopular scientific journal, published a translation of my letter and started an Enquête, or inquiry, asking French scientists to express their opinions as to the reality of the N rays. About forty letters were published in the succeeding numbers, only a half dozen backing Blondlot. The most scathing was one by Le Bel, who said, “What a spectacle for French science when one of its distinguished savants measures the position of the spectrum lines, while the prism reposes in the pocket of his American colleague!”

Only two papers on N rays appeared in the Comptes rendus after this. They may have been delayed in the mail. The Academy at its annual meeting in December, when the prize and medal were presented, announced the award as given to Blondlot “for his life work, taken as a whole”.

* * *

The tragic exposure eventually led to Blondlot’s madness and death. He was a great man, utterly sincere, who had “gone off the deep end”, perhaps through some form of self-hypnotism or overstimulated retinal imagination due to years of staring in the dark. What Wood had done, reluctantly but with scientific ruthlessness, had been the coup de grace.

This climax was summarized by A. A. Campbell Swinton, F.R.S., in the Westminster Gazette:

… the highest scientific tribunal in France had made its award and all apparently went well till an American Professor of Physics — R. W. Wood, of Baltimore, now a foreign member of the Royal Society of London — exploded completely and forever the whole discovery by showing to Blondlot that he continued to see the spectrum, when no spectrum could possibly exist there, if indeed there ever had been one!

Toward outright scientific frauds and fakers, Wood is scornful and merciless, never feeling any sadness or depression over their exposure, but rather a savage and amused elation. One night in Baltimore, after a dinner, he told me and a couple of friends a number of his adventures in this field.

Some years ago, I was asked by Mr. Bernard Baker, president of the Atlantic Transport Line and trustee of the university, to come down to his office and look into the apparatus of a man whose experiments he was financing. It was a scheme for transmitting speech and signals under water. The man claimed he’d discovered a new chemical which was sensitive to sound. Mr. Baker had given him a large room in his office building to use as a laboratory, and I was taken there. He had a large table covered with a hodgepodge of pseudoscientific instruments. There was a dome-shaped bell with eight small pendulums hanging around it, touching its rim. Several parts of a typewriter were included in the setup! The whole thing, on the face of it, was perfectly preposterous, a collection of junk connected by wires. The inventor said his chemical was so sensitive to sound that it was decomposed by noises which the human ear could not possibly hear. I asked him how he could make it, if it was so sensitive, and he said he had to prepare it undersea, in a diving bell! I advised Mr. Baker to kick the man out of his office — which he did a day or two later.

On another occasion I was taken to the roof of a downtown office building to see a demonstration by an inventor who claimed he’d found a method of getting power out of the atmosphere. His table was covered with electric motors, a small toy railroad with an electric locomotive, and other little gadgets run by electricity. At one end of the table a pole ran up in the air, with fifteen or twenty brass points radiating from it. These, he said, gathered the power from the atmosphere, which came down the wire and operated the toys and gadgets on the table. There was a crowd of newspaper reporters and one or two men from whom he was trying to get money. There were several boxes under the table, partly covered by burlap, and one box which was completely covered. Nobody had paid any attention to this part of the “exhibit”, and I pulled the burlap from the box that was completely covered, disclosing a big storage battery with two wires leading up to the top of the table, along the inside of one of the legs! He cleared out of the hotel without paying his bill, carrying all of his apparatus with him.

“They used to tar and feather ’em when they came like that out West”, interpolated Leslie Hohman, the psychiatrist. “There’s a difference between the deluded crank and the deliberate faker. In which class, by the way, was that Paris inventor who did monkey tricks with electric light bulbs, and got into the semiscientific journals for a while? He was going to revolutionize all our lighting systems, as I recall”.

Well, I never quite knew (replied Wood). As a matter of fact I don’t know yet whether he was trying to bribe — or befuddle — me with champagne. But whether crook or crackpot, he was an amusing fellow. He claimed he could reduce the amount of current required for illumination to a fifth of what the bulbs use now. I happened to cross over that summer with the New York capitalist who was planning to sink $20,000 in the experiments, and promised to investigate the phenomenon. I warned him not to disclose my identity but to say merely that I was a Mr. Wood, a friend of his, who was also interested in the invention. About a week after I’d arrived in Paris, there came a phone call inviting me to the inventor’s house and laboratories. His idea was to feed short intermittent pulses of current into the lamps in succession. He used double the voltage for which the lamps were rated, shooting the flashes of current from one lamp to another. He was innocent as a babe of any suspicion I was a physicist. He supposed I was just another American business man who knew all about dollars but nothing about dynamos. He assured me solemnly that light produced from lamps by his method had very peculiar properties resembling those of X rays, as they could penetrate flesh so that you could see the bones! He held one in his clenched fist and tried to make me think I was “seeing the bones”!

Presently he illuminated three lamps arranged on a rotating wheel at the center of the ceiling. Up to then I had listened openmouthed to his fantastic claims, as if bewildered and entranced, but now I asked for a hand mirror which was presently found for me by his assistant. I studied the reflection of the whirling lamps in the mirror and waggled the mirror rapidly to and fro, muttering some gibberish to myself about a “luminous sine-wave curve of variable intensity”.

“Ah” and “ah” again exclaimed the inventor, “Monsieur then comprehends something of the physik?” I was tired of the nonsense, though it had been amusing, so I said, “Yes, I am R. W. Wood of Johns Hopkins University”.

He hesitated for a perceptible second, then leaped on me in ecstasy, shaking my hand in seeming delight. “Oh, but this is for me a very great honor! Wait and you shall see”. Whereupon he darted out of the room, returning in a moment with a copy of my Physical Optics. Then, believe it or not as Ripley says, he turned page after page (of my own book, Lord help us!) with marked paragraphs, and exclaimed, “Here you see the proof! Here and here and here! And now we shall drink to your health… He pushed a bell, gave his instructions, and presently the butler appeared with a bottle of champagne. The circus had been well worth an entire morning lost — but not worth my friend’s $20,000.

* * *

Allen W. Harris of the Baltimore Sun, who was pouring us all another drop of whisky, said, “Maybe he thought if you’d go in cahoots with him, you could raise it to a million”.

SCIENTIFIC DETECTIVE: Wood examines a bomb fragment while Lieutenant Itzel looks on, during the investigation of the Brandy bomb mystery.

CELEBRITIES: Wood, Max Planck and Albert Einstein in the front row of a scientific lecture in Berlin in 1931. It was after this meeting that Wood tested the party guests with the bitter-tasteless powder.

The most fantastic piece of electro-medical hokum ever brought to his attention, says Wood, was the recent “discovery” of a method of sending the curative properties of sulfanilamide over a copper wire to an aluminum plate on which bottles of distilled water were standing. At the end of a half hour the water in each bottle was supposed to become highly charged with the germicidal properties of the drug. This charged water, the inventor claimed, could then be used internally or by intravenous injections… “with results equal to those produced by solution of the sulfanilamide itself in water”. And he claimed that it had made “a favorable impression” on the director of the Chemical Foundation in New York!

The inventor of the discovery was asked to demonstrate it before a committee at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Dr. Perrin Long, who has been largely responsible for putting sulfanilamide on the map, persuaded Wood to help debunk the demonstration.

The inventor in this case was a true “screw ball” who believed he would be a benefactor of mankind. He was not seeking the Foundation’s money. He had plenty of his own.

“It was funny and crazy”, says Wood, “but pathetic”.

When Eusapia Palladino visited America thirty years ago, many celebrated scientists, in addition to the psychologists and psychic-research crowd, had begun to take an active and inquisitive interest in mediums. The Scientific American sponsored and financed a committee to investigate the famous Italian medium, while the newspapers reported that Mr. Edison was working on a sensitized electrical apparatus which might supersede ouija boards and planchettes in the séance room. Wood took his pen in hand and gave birth to the following ode, which he entitled “The Edison Specter-Scope”!

“Of mediums I trust not one”, Said Thomas Alva Edison. “The planchette plays pernicious pranks, The table tips and turns and twanks. With mediums I cannot grope — I shall invent a specter-scope!” He called his helpers one by one, Did Thomas Alva Edison. They took some wheels, a spring, a cam, Attached them to a diaphragm, Arranged a lens within a coil, A red-hot strip of platinum foil. And when at last the thing was done They put it in a vacuum. “With your ideas I sure agree”, Said Mr. Thomas Alva E. “To show themselves through this, the Shades Will all come trooping up from Hades. For this old Noah will leave his Ark And travel down to Menlo Park. Put down the shades, shut out the sun”, Said Thomas Alva Edison. “And let the Pianola play Turn on the ultraviolet ray And watch old Thomas cramp the style Of Oliver Lodge and Conan Doyle”.

Wood was never much interested in the purely psychic pretensions of the mediums, but he had an inordinate curiosity concerning the floating trumpets, tambourines, ectoplasmic excrescences which at that time were, and frequently still are, a part of the mise en scène which heralds the approach of the dear departed.

When Palladino was brought to New York, Dr. Wood was asked to serve on the American committee. She was primarily a physical medium — and physics was his meat. The physical medium doesn’t produce messages from the dead, but gives séances in which objects at a distance are moved, breezes blow, phosphorescent lights appear, tables rise in the air, impressions of hands are produced in wet clay, while musical instruments are played at a distance from the medium, who is supposed to be either securely tied or held firmly in the grasp of spectators — or both.

The Palladino sittings (says Wood) were held in the physical laboratory of Columbia University. The cabinet had been built into the doorway in Professor Hallock’s office in such a way that it jutted back into the apparatus room adjoining. They had cut a hole through the brick wall which separated the two rooms, close to the floor so that an observer could lie in the apparatus room and watch what was going on under the table, or as much as could be seen in the dim light. The cabinet contained a table on which the usual pieces of apparatus reposed, a tambourine, a bunch of flowers, and one or two other things that I have forgotten. Eusapia sat in a chair with her back to the curtain, her hands resting on a small wooden table, around which the other observers were gathered. Palladino was known to cheat whenever she was given an opportunity, and was frequently caught doing so. I convinced myself very early in the series of sittings that all the phenomena were fraud. I was puzzled by the blowing out of the curtains, with all the windows closed and the doors locked. Münsterberg, who succeeded Professor James at Harvard, attended some sittings later on, and explained that the curtain had been blown out by a jet of air from a rubber bulb that she had in her hand. Objects were “brought” out from the cabinet and appeared on the table in front of Palladino when her hands and feet were supposed to be held, and I was anxious to see what the instrument was that had reached back through the curtain. I decided it could be seen if the floor of the cabinet were feebly illuminated. An observer lying on the top of an apparatus case in the next room, looking down through a hole in the top of the cabinet could see whether an arm or hand reached back for the tambourine, or whether the trick was done with some mechanical appliance. It was necessary, however, to arrange this so that Palladino would not see the light on the floor, as she had a way of pushing back the curtain and looking in occasionally. I accomplished this by making a wooden grill of thin, vertical slats, like a Venetian blind, painted black, which covered the floor under the cabinet. By propping one corner of the cabinet up for a quarter of an inch with a little wedge and placing an electric light to one side of the cabinet, the rays entered through the crack and spread over the floor, producing a feeble illumination. I could see this from above, looking down through the hole in the top, and between the slats, which, however, obscured the luminosity entirely from the eyes of Palladino, who was sitting at one side…

And, sure enough, at the very next sitting, peering down from my recumbent hiding-place above the cabinet, I could see a distinct black outline like a shadow silhouetted against the luminous floor. It was a long pointed triangle, and it poked around among the flowers and the tambourine but failed to bring anything out through the curtain. Palladino had an uncanny intuition whenever anything had been planned to trap her. She may have got a glimpse of the wooden grill on the floor that evening, which made her suspicious, even if she did not know the purpose for which it had been placed there. I finally decided to use X rays, placing a powerful tube on one side of the cabinet, and a fluorescent screen about four feet square on the opposite side. We tried this out before the sitting and it worked beautifully. Anyone reaching back through the curtain to the table could be at once detected and the observer in the dark room behind would see the bones of the hand and arm, or the projecting rod if she used one, as a sharp, black shadow on the fluorescent screen. We all had high hopes of this equipment, but when Palladino arrived she said she was “not feeling well” that evening and would not hold a sitting.

* * *

If Wood was a ruthless expert in setting scientific bear traps, Palladino was a “bear” at smelling them out and evading them.

She’d had her toes pinched occasionally, and was wary. She was “feeling no better” the next day, or the next, or on any day thereafter, so far as the American committee was concerned, if Wood was on it. The record shows she refused ever to hold another sitting for them.

Wood was, and still is, an admirer of hers. Convinced that so far as any supernatural or even supernormal power was concerned, it was all a fraud, he considers her to have been the greatest performer of her time, and the greatest, perhaps, in the history of the world. He had profound respect for her ability — and apparently she also had for his.

He has, on the contrary, an impatient, biting scorn for all “psychic” and spiritualist mediums, whether amateur or professional, who claim communion with the dead — and has taken a fiendish delight in skinning a lot of them. He got out of patience some years ago with a doctor acquaintance who had suddenly discovered wonderful psychic gifts in his wife while fiddling with the ouija board. This doctor usually had a finger or two of his own on the board while it was scrambling to and fro along the alphabet, and later when they graduated to the planchette, he still kept his own fingers on the little table. Presently a furor was created by the announcement that the doctor’s wife had pulled a poem out of the infinite — in an ancient, unknown language. Taken to an authority on obscure ancient dialects, it proved to be in Old Icelandic. It was the copy of an actual poem which had been written centuries ago, the original being in the British Museum. Later Wood learned, however, that reproductions had appeared in a printed journal as late as the eighteenth century — and he smelt a very smelly rat. There was no way, however, to smoke the rat out of its hole. You couldn’t prove that sort of thing. You couldn’t prove that the doting doctor husband had copied the poem and simply reproduced it via his wife and her planchette. But later they made the mistake of inviting Wood to one of their spirit hunts, and offered to raise a spook for him. The host said:

“Is there anyone whom you knew well and who has died quite recently — preferably one who has ‘gone over’ no longer than a year or two ago?”

“Yes”, said Wood, “I’d very much like something from Lord Rayleigh”. Lord Rayleigh, the great British physicist, had died just a little while before. Wood wanted no wishy- washy wraiths. He asked for a tough one.

They put their hands on the board, and the host said repeatedly, “Lord Rayleigh, are you with us?” Presently the planchette wrote “Yes”, and the host said to Wood, “Have you any question to ask by which he can establish his identity?”

“Yes, I should like any remembrance he has of Terling”. Terling was the name of Lord Rayleigh’s country place. Presently the planchette began to tremble, and soon neatly wrote, “The ring of the stones on the swept ice”.

The rat was in the bag! The literarily gifted spook-summoner had tangled the word with “curling”, the Scotch game in which heavy flat stones are skidded over ice which has been swept clean with a broom. Wood was a guest, so he contained his contempt, and bade the doctor and his wife good night.

Sometimes these sources of seemingly spirit-inspired knowledge are not easy to trace. After Wood had begun to learn most of the tricks and their answers, he couldn’t refrain, of course, from occasionally using them, and hoisting his credulous friends by their own petards. The victims of his most celebrated hoax were Professor Hyslop of Columbia and Sir Oliver Lodge. Pure chance, in that case, had supplied him with the mysterious necessary knowledge. While crossing to England he’d been introduced on the boat to an attractive young widow who wanted his advice. Her husband had gone down on the Titanic. Subsequently she had met Professor Hyslop, who took her to a medium. She had an elaborately bound, typewritten report of all the sittings, and no human being save herself, the medium, and Hyslop had ever laid eyes on it. Now she wanted Wood to read it, and he did. Most of the messages were the usual clichés such as “waiting for you”, “happy in this new life”, etc., etc. But there was one phrase which had an element of novelty, on the page which recorded the dead husband’s thoughts immediately before the boat went down:

“I am standing on the bridge near the captain… we are going down… the water is rising… it’s up to my knees… to my waist… to my shoulders… this is the end. The engines are coming up!”

Now what could that have been intended to mean? Wood wondered. The widow too had puzzled over it. Perhaps a rush of steam as the water reached the furnaces? Not likely. It stuck in Wood’s memory like a cocklebur, because it was peculiar. The lady was on her way to London, where she was to meet Professor Hyslop again. He was going to take her to a celebrated English medium from whom they hoped to get what the psychical researchers call “cross references”. Wood, arriving in England, was the house guest for a few days of Sir Oliver and Lady Lodge.

After dinner on the second day (Wood tells me) Sir Oliver said, “Oh, by the way, we have another guest arriving tomorrow who is your countryman”. “Who is it?” I asked. “Professor Hyslop of Columbia”, replied Sir Oliver.

Hyslop arrived in due course, and after dinner I got them going on psychic phenomena. Presently I invented an imaginary instance in which a man’s wife had drowned in her cabin when a yacht was sunk in a collision. Her husband had received “messages” from her describing her last thoughts as the water rushed in through the rent in the hull. Hyslop sat up and said, “That’s very remarkable. I have a similar case now”. “Tell it”, we said. “Unfortunately I cannot, I’ve been sworn to secrecy. Nobody but the medium and a lady and I know the story”. “Oh, but you can tell it impersonally, mentioning no names, can’t you?” I asked. “Yes, why not?” said Sir Oliver. “There’s no breach of trust in that”.

Well, he finally consented and spun a rather long story, to which I pretended to be listening dreamily. Finally he got to the point, “And then very remarkably he told us his last thoughts, ‘I’m on the bridge, the water is rising, it’s up to my neck, the — ’ The — let’s see — what was it? Oh, yes, ‘The machinery is rising!’ Now what could he have meant by that? I’ve asked naval architects and sea captains, and they can’t imagine”.

I sat with bowed head, my eyes covered with one hand. “No”, I said, “not the machinery is rising — the engines are coming up!”

Hyslop jumped like a jack-in-the-box. “What made you say that?” he asked. “Say what?” I asked, waking up. He repeated it. “Did I say that?” I asked. “You certainly did, didn’t he, Sir Oliver?” “Yes, he certainly did”. “Well”, I said, “if I said that I suppose it was because it came into my mind”.

“The most extraordinary thing I’ve ever heard!” said Hyslop. “Telepathy with the subconscious mind! That was the communication, but I’d forgotten it”.

I never confessed to either of them. Several years later, I again met the charming widow. She had ceased to be interested in mediums, and I told her the story.

* * *

Perhaps the most amusing comment on Sir Oliver was made by the Woods’ maid, when Sir Oliver and Lady Lodge were house guests of the Woods in Baltimore. Sir Oliver was to deliver a series of lectures in The Lyric, which is Baltimore’s “opera house”. On the first night the hall was jammed. The public expected him to talk of spooks, ghosts, and the dear departed. His talk was pure science — abstruse and dry. On the next night his audience had dwindled to a tiny group of fellow-scientists. It seems, however, he’d talked earnestly enough of life beyond the grave at the Woods’ table, for when he’d gone the colored maid, long familiar with Wood’s Luciferian raillery, ventured to say:

“Miss Gertrude, it sure made a difference, having dat nice Evangelist in de house”.

I asked Dr. Wood to venture a guess as to why such able scientific men as Flammarion, Crookes, Hyslop, Lodge, and others had been credulous and at times so easily duped — as they had been — by fraudulent spiritualists and mediums. He made a reply which I think throws a lot of light on it.

“The pure scientist”, said he, “is trained to investigate nature’s immutable laws, subtle and complex though they may be. He can perform controlled, quantitative investigations. When it comes to outwitting the guile of the human mind, where the laws are no longer immutable and the scene can be shifted to suit the circumstances, the scientist, despite his skepticism, who has not been indoctrinated in the art of tracking down the fraud, will in his ingenuousness be an easy dupe. The old adage, ‘It takes a thief to catch a thief,’ is only too well demonstrated”.

I suspect that most of the scientific gentlemen, both among the public committees and the privately credulous, who have investigated or held traffic with the spiritualists and mediums, have been on the whole too soft and polite to apply in a literal and ruthless way Wood’s quoted adage. This is partially understandable, particularly in the light of the fact that so many mediums are of the so-called tender sex.

I doubt, for instance, whether there is one among them save this ruthless devil himself, who would have dared to do what he did in the case of the Harvard-investigated Margery…

The Harvard committee, after elaborate investigation, had pronounced the celebrated Boston medium fraudulent, but Dr. William McDougall of Oxford and Duke universities had hedged on it, and the Society for Psychical Research was wanting a further investigation. They induced Professors Knight Dunlap, H. C. McComas, and Wood to form a new committee of three and go up to Boston. Here is the account which Wood has given me of his own sardonic “meddlesomeness” — from the repercussion of which Margery was carried out screeching and fainting. It begins scientifically enough, but soon goes into clinches.

At one of the sittings (Wood says) I brought in an ultraviolet lamp of the type I developed during the war for secret signaling. It emitted a flood of invisible light, though to the eye it appeared only as a very dark red photographer’s darkroom lantern. I asked permission to use this, representing that it was an especially dark light, which was true, and might be favorable to the manifestations. I had with me secretly a small camera with a lens of large aperture with which I felt sure photographs could be made. I showed the lamp to Dr. Crandon, Margery’s husband, while the room was lighted, turned on the lamp, and asked him if it would be all right to use it. He said he would have to consult with the control, “Walter”, a brother of Margery who’d died many years ago. “Walter” said it was O.K. As soon as Margery had gone into a trance, as signified by heavy breathing, the lights were turned down and the “phenomena” commenced. I turned on the ultraviolet light and got out my camera. But looking up I saw that all the bouquets of artificial flowers on the mantelpiece and various other objects in the room had been painted with phosphorescent paint and were glowing in vivid colors, in fact the whole place was lit up like a cathedral. I turned off the light immediately and made no further effort to use it, for the cat was out of the bag. After the sitting was over, Margery came up to me and said in a low voice, “Say, Professor, what kind of light was that you turned on there?”

I said, “Why? What’s the matter with it?”

“Why, everything in the room, all the flowers and everything, was lit up”, she replied.

I said, “How did you know that? I thought you were in a trance”. She laughed and walked away.

At another séance we were permitted to see the ectoplasm. I was sitting in front of a checkerboard which had been placed on the center of the table opposite Margery, the squares of which had been painted along the edges with luminous paint. Several objects were placed on this which were supposed to be moved by the ectoplasm. Margery had a luminous star attached to her forehead, so that we could keep track of her face in the dark. After a few minutes a narrow dark rod appeared, silhouetted over the luminous checkerboard. It moved from side to side and picked up one of the objects. Later on, as it passed in front of me, I reached out very carefully and touched it with the tip of my finger, following it back until I came to a point very near Margery’s mouth. It seemed probable that she was holding it in her teeth. A moment or two afterwards I took hold of the tip of it very quietly and pinched it. It felt like a steel knitting needle covered with one or two layers of soft leather. Neither Margery nor the control gave any evidence of having realized what I had done — though we had been warned beforehand on no account to touch the ectoplasm, as it would be sure to result in the illness or possible death of the medium.

At the end of the sitting, Margery was alive and in good spirits. Beer and cheese were brought, and we talked over things that had happened. At these sittings everything was taken down by a stenographer and subsequently typed for the benefit of the committee. I said, “Oh, there’s one thing I forgot to mention, and I should like to have it taken down now”.

Dr. Crandon objected, insisting that only things said during the séance should be transcribed. I finally persuaded him, however, by representing it as a matter of slight importance, and he said, “All right, go ahead”.

The stenographer got out her pencil, and I began dictating slowly and solemnly a complete description of my “experiment” with the ectoplasm. Margery gave a shriek and fell back in her chair, pretending to faint. She was carried out of the room, and the committee was asked to depart. Later they pretended she was dangerously ill for weeks as the result of my “brutality”.

* * *

A Morgan case?” repeated Wood, puzzled and a bit impatiently. “You say a Morgan case? It must be a mistake. I never had anything to do with any Morgan case”.

I said, “But, heck, it’s here in this list of crimes, murders, mysteries, fires, bombs, explosions…

“Oh, of course”, said Wood. “Why didn’t you say explosions? It means the Wall Street bomb. I helped at the request of Tom Lamont, one of the Morgan partners”.

The “Wall Street bomb case” was a wholesale murder outrage that will never be forgotten by New York. Just before noon on September 16, 1920, a driver who passed so completely unnoticed that no description of him was ever obtained left a horse-drawn yellow wagon at the curb in front of the United States Assay Office, across the street from the Morgan bank. He hitched the horse to an iron block and disappeared, forever, in the hurrying crowds. A few moments later, with the street even more crowded, the big barrel bomb in the wagon exploded, killing thirty-nine persons, crippling scores, inflicting slighter wounds on at least four hundred — also damaging the Morgan bank, the United States Subtreasury and Assay Office, and other adjacent financial buildings. Wood’s account of his part in the case is as follows.

All through the thirties Wood continued his experimental work. But he was internationally famous now, and in demand everywhere to attend learned societies and receive rewards and medals. All through the decade he was leaping from America to Europe and back again, and always finding time for a strenuous social life and his terrible poltergeist pranks.

He was asked to write the article on fluorescence for the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He wanted to reproduce a picture of the human face taken by the light of the ultraviolet lamp he’d invented during the war. By these invisible rays, the whitest skin appears dark chocolate, the teeth shine with a ghostly blue light, and the pupil of the eye appears white instead of dark. As he was crossing one of the university corridors he said to a pretty typist, to whom he had never said anything before except a vague good morning: “How would you like to have your picture in the next edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica?”

“What on earth, Dr. Wood? You’re kidding me, of course!” “Not at all. I mean it. Would you like to?”

“Why, yes! But how, and why?”

“Come along”, he said, “and let me take your photograph. It’s to illustrate the article I’m writing, and I want a pretty girl for it”.

He took her to his laboratory, set up the camera, lighted the ultraviolet lamp, drew the black window shades down, and made the exposure. A year later as he passed the office, he said, “Look up the article on ‘Fluorescence’ in the library upstairs, and you’ll find your picture”. She did, and screeched, for her blonde face was black as any cornfield Negro’s. It’s the nearest thing to a mean joke Wood has ever played on a human being.

In 1929, he went back to London with Mrs. Wood and Elizabeth. On the boat were Dr. Mayo of the Mayo Clinic, Dr. Yan- dell Henderson, Yale physiologist, and Sam Barlow, the composer… so the Woods had congenial company. The stay in London was as usual a combination of busman’s holiday for Wood, and fun for all of them.

John Balderston had a play in rehearsal at the Lyric in which the time was supposed to change from the present to 1783, during a moment while the stage was in darkness. How to make the switchback emotionally and psychologically effective was a problem which Wood offered to solve. His idea was that the lowest of all notes, subaudible but vibrating the eardrum, would produce an eerie sensation, and put the audience in a mood for what followed. It was accomplished with a super organ pipe, larger and longer than any used in church organs, and was tried out at the dress rehearsal. Only Wood, Leslie Howard, Balderston, and the producer, Gilbert Miller, in the small audience knew what was coming. A scream from the blackened stage indicated a time relapse of 145 years. The Wood subaudible note was turned on. An effect occurred like that which precedes an earthquake. The glass in every chandelier in the old Lyric commenced to tinkle, all the windows rattled. The whole building vibrated, and a wave of fear spread out to Shaftsbury Avenue. Miller ordered the so-and-so organ pipe thrown out immediately.

This, by the way, was only one of Wood’s ventures in the theater. Flo Ziegfeld, a neighbor of the Woods in East Hampton, was a frequent visitor to the barn laboratory, and after seeing the miracles effected by invisible light and other special rays, asked if Wood could devise a system of lights and costumes of special material which would disappear when the stage illumination changed, leaving the girls practically naked. Wood worked it out completely. To make it funny, the comedian was to appear with a chorus of girls in evening dress. He was to carry an “X-ray” field glass, and to explain that their clothes vanish when he looks at them. As he turned the glass on them, the lights would change, and they would appear stark naked to the audience. He was then to turn the X-ray field glass on the audience.

It was a little too soon for so daring a strip without the tease, and the act never went into production. Wood gave Ziegfeld other ideas, however, having mainly to do with stage lighting, which were incorporated in the Follies, year after year.

In 1934 Wood was elected vice-president of the American Physical Society and attended the annual meeting of the Pacific Coast Section in Berkeley, California. The sessions were held in the buildings of the University of California, in conjunction with the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The attendance was large, and each member was required to wear a large button with his name on it.

George Kaufman’s political satire, Of Thee I Sing, exploiting “Wintergreen and Throttlebottom”, candidates for President and Vice-President, had been the hit of the season in New York. As Wood was now vice-president of the Society, he wrote “Throttlebottom” on his badge, and the meeting at once divided into two groups, a minority which was onto the gag, and a majority which was not. The badge was continually supplying amusing situations, as when an elderly lady at a garden party introduced him by his stage name to a circle of her friends, and when a young professor who had just introduced him to two charming young ladies as “Professor Wood”, was corrected by them, glanced at the badge, made profuse apologies, and added, “A most extraordinary resemblance”.

After the meetings at Berkeley were over, Wood hurried back East, picked up Gertrude, and together they sailed for Europe and the International Congress on Radio-Biology at Venice.

The opening meeting of the congress was held in the Doge’s palace, in the Grand Ducal room. Especially invited foreign delegates sat in a semicircle on the enormous dais. Marconi, president of the congress, gave the first address.

Wood had been asked to show the motion pictures of the Tuxedo experiments with supersonic waves. His lecture was delivered in English, and because of anticipated interest, arrangements had been made to have it translated sentence by sentence, as delivered, into three additional languages. It began something like this: “Ladies and gentlemen, I take great pleasure in being able to show you with a motion-picture machine the results…

At this point the polyglot interpreter raised her hand and said, “One moment, please… Messieurs et Mesdames — c’est avec un vif plaisir que je me trouve capable de vous montrer, à l'aide du cinéma… Meine Herren und Damen, es ist mir eine grosse Vergnügen dass ich im Stande bin Ihnen zu zeigen, mittels einer Maschine für Lebendebilde… Signori c Signorini, sono molto lieto di potervi dimostrare oggi i risul- tati delle nostre esperienze per mezzo cinematografico…

She paused and looked encouragingly at Wood. By that time he had completely lost the thread of even the simple phrases with which he had begun his talk. One can imagine the predicament in which he found himself when a similar treatment was applied to the technical part of the description. Wood remarked, “Why my highly sophisticated audience did not drown this polyglot nightmare in waves of laughter, I have never understood”. He says this was the most painful experience he has ever had on a lecture platform, especially as he had heard his wife remark to an Italian, who had been bored by the long papers that had been given, some of them lasting over half an hour, “Well, you won’t be bored by Mr. Wood’s lecture, because he always gives his addresses in the shortest possible time”.

Marconi’s famous yacht, the Electra, was anchored in the harbor. This was the yacht on which all of his experimental apparatus was installed. But none of the members of the congress was invited on board. The only exception, Wood says, was Arthur Compton’s little boy, who was interested in wireless.

The Woods were given a cocktail party at one of the cafes on the Piazza San Marco. The Marconis were invited to the same party, but told their hosts they could come only after dark, since their appearance in public in daylight caused a crowd to collect, and the crowd usually followed them about from place to place. They appeared about dusk and sure enough, within a minute or two, people began converging on the cocktail party from the entire Piazza, whereupon the Marconis arose hastily, excused themselves, and disappeared.

In April, 1931, Friedrich W. von Prittwitz, the German Ambassador at Washington, on behalf of Berlin University, and at a large reception given in honor of Dr. and Mrs. Wood at the Embassy, presented Wood with an honorary Ph.D. By that time the fact that the famous Johns Hopkins professor was not a Ph.D. had become a sort of academic joke. Most incipient professors, while still young, take the pains to obtain the degree before they so much as dare apply for an instructor- ship in any first-class college. Wood doesn’t blame Harvard for overlooking him. It wasn’t Harvard’s fault. He just hadn’t bothered to do the routine. And in the meantime he’d been given, from his own and a dozen other countries, nearly every degree, gold medal, silver medal, bronze medal, and academic honor[11] that could be showered on a scientist.

Now that Berlin belatedly had capped his LL.D.’s with a fine new Herr Doktor’s Ph.D., “made in Germany”, our hero was duly grateful, but didn’t take it oversolemnly. At the lecture and subsequent banquet given in his honor when the Woods visited Berlin that summer, he couldn’t resist trotting out the magic, humanity-dividing powder he’d been playing tricks with in America and in England, where he and Mrs. Wood had stopped the week before.

I quote from Wood’s notes concerning what happened when they reached Germany.

This triple tale of a curiosity-inflamed Promethean poltergeist begins with lightning and boomerangs, circles properly back to the point of departure as boomerangs should — and then sails off, still boomerang-propelled, into amateur experiments in infant psychology, including a gunpowder plot directed at his own innocent and bored baby granddaughter. Yet the man has kept complaining that I make him out a monster in parts of this narrative…

When I went out, on Mrs. Wood’s gracious invitation, to their summer place at East Hampton last June for a few days’ quiet rest from work on this biography, I found myself chasing all day long in the fields surrounding the farmstead, at the heels of this unextinguishable Crile Elk who never gets tired of anything, at an age when most learned professors are occasionally fain to sit down or take naps. Our main expeditions were across the road into a big field spotted with daisies, where he threw the boomerang and tried to teach me to do it. Previously he had led me to a clover field beyond the bam laboratory, where he had taken his celebrated “autograph of a thunderbolt”.

The thunderbolt’s “signature”, which still hangs in the barn, and which was reproduced with photographs and an article some years ago in the Scientific American, was obtained by Dr. Wood just after it had nearly killed him. Said he, showing me the spot:

“A heavy storm had passed, and the sky was blue overhead. I started across this small field which separated our house from that of my sister-in-law. I had gone about a dozen yards along the path in the grass when my daughter Margaret called to me. I stopped for perhaps ten seconds, and just as I started off again a brilliant blue line of fire came down from the sky with a report like that of a twelve-inch gun, striking the path about twenty feet in front of me and sending up an enormous white cloud of steam. I walked on to see what record the flash had left. There was a withered patch of clover about six inches across, with a hole in the center half an inch in diameter. If Margaret hadn’t called and stopped me, I’d have been ‘on the spot.’ I went back to the laboratory, melted about eight pounds of solder, and poured it into the hole”.

What he had dug out after it hardened looks like a slightly bent, oversized dog whip, cast in metal, heavy as dog whips are at the handle, and tapering gradually to a point. It is slightly over three feet long. My own surprise was that it hadn’t penetrated the earth more deeply.

When we’d returned to the house for tea, I noticed a boomerang reposing on the mantel in the living room. It was a large one — no toy. It was what I suppose a bushman would call a business boomerang. It was made of hardwood, polished, smooth.

“Did it come from Borneo?” I asked.

“I made it myself”, replied Wood. “I’ve made a lot of them”. He took me across into the big daisy field, and for the first time I was watching an expert throw the boomerang. The stance, form, and follow-through seemed more complicated than those in golf, tennis, discus-throwing, or anything I knew. The stance of the discus-thrower in Roman sculpture is closest to the stance Wood took — right foot well forward, shoulders bent to the left, the boomerang held far to the left and backward, with the arm curved behind the waist. Then forward on the left foot, with the boomerang coming up, vertical, high above the right shoulder. As the final step or leap forward is made with the right foot, the boomerang is thrown overhand and perpendicularly — and a little downward, almost as if toward the ground. Instead of striking the ground, it turns over on its side, when properly thrown, and then begins to soar upward in a sweeping curve. When well thrown, it completes the curve and returns to the thrower’s feet. The sport is not without danger. Experts have been in hospitals with broken kneecaps and other injuries.

Dr. Wood encouraged me to try. I managed after repeated trials to make the boomerang rise once. But not in a good flight. Boomerang-throwing requires as much form, practice, and skill as top-notch tennis or golf.

That evening I said to Wood: “You are supposed never to have shown much interest in games or sports. How did you happen to take up boomerangs?”

He said: “It touches aerodynamics, of course, and I suppose my first interest was technical… scientific. But it soon occurred to me that the best way to learn about them would be to throw them myself”.

He loves to talk, and this is what he told me.

In the early twenties, John Rathbone Oliver inscribed on the guest book at East Hampton a tribute in verse to the Wood tribe. It — the verse, not the tribe — is graciously Victorian, abounding in polite conceits.

Except for the Victorian restraint and for the passage of the years during which Margaret’s children have grown up, Elizabeth has married and become mother of another little “Elizabeth”, etc., it remains a fair picture of the tribe. All the gracious comments are still true today. The Woods are indeed a gracious family — but that’s not the whole picture by a long shot. The Woods are also a fantastic family. This is not surprising, since the old New England stock from which they stem has brightened American history with many fantastic characters and families.

In truth the whole clan, when gathered together for family reunions or summer holidays, takes on some of the qualities of Sanger’s Circus, or of an imaginary play by Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward in collaboration. Robert, Jr., by the way, though extremely fond of beautiful young ladies, has remained a bachelor, is a business man in New York, and is generally to be found at the Harvard Club on his off evenings. A while back, he wrote a funny book entitled Hold 'em, Girls! It’s a Harvard man’s post-Emily-Post etiquette for young women invited to football games. The youngest imp in the household when it reunites is six-year-old Elizabeth Bogert, who has inherited more than her share of her grandfather’s prankishness and curiosity. When I first visited Dr. and Mrs. Wood in Baltimore, and while they were telling me about the second and third generation, none of whom I had yet met, Mrs. Wood said casually, “Elizabeth married a Dutchman”. I’d expected he’d be at least as Dutch as Hendrik Willem van Loon, but when I later met Ned Bogert, I discovered him to be Dutch — like the Kips and the Roosevelts. His people had been in New York ever since New Amsterdam was founded. The Woods are pure English stock — and pure New England stock — on both sides, since colonial times. They are fond of their son-in- law and treat him as a son, but “Elizabeth married a Dutchman”.

They are all full of violent opinions and prejudices, happily never the same ones, and if any opinion apart from family loyalty were ever shared by any two of them at the same time, the astonishment would be general. They engage frequently in debates which at times terrify the guest or stranger. Later he becomes even more bewildered. Robert, Jr., will denounce his father with the freedom and eloquence of an ex-artillery officer, or vice versa, and next morning they’ll be as affectionate as if they were “buddies” of the same generation. It’s the same with all the family. One night last summer at East Hampton, Mrs. Wood got into a hair-raising dispute with her son-in-law over the respective merits of certain Flemish and Italian paintings, and at the height of their difference exclaimed with outraged finality, “Well, that’s just what could be expected from a Dutchman!” Ned Bogert and I were tying some luggage on the back of a car next morning, when a heavy thundershower came up. I had on a leather coat, but Bogert had no raincoat or covering and was dressed for the city. Mrs. Wood rushed out, dragged him into the house, made him take off his wet jacket, felt his shirt to see whether he should take that off too, hung his jacket to dry before the morning log fire, and found him a raincoat. I stopped gratuitously worrying about the Woods’ family “quarrels”. The subjects on which they engage in Shavian denunciations and dialectics are seldom personal and never boring.

There is always, for instance, the tender subject of Dr. Wood and the piano. The legend is that after the age of sixty he learned to play the piano and executed the noisy Rachmaninoff Prelude in C sharp minor with such pyrotechnic brilliancy that all and sundry were astounded — and appalled.

“The story”, he said, “is grossly exaggerated — and all wrong anyway. I never played for guests, in Baltimore or here or anywhere”.

“What about your daughter’s version?” I asked.

“It’s utter and absolute nonsense, and the thing isn’t worth so much talk anyway. I don’t see what you want to put it in the biography for at all”.

I said, “What she told me is worth putting in anybody’s biography. If her version is apocryphal, suppose you give me the true version”. (Incidentally, he can’t whistle or hum “Yankee Doodle” to save his life without getting off the key.) He said:

1. The Kingdom of the Dream. Experience with Hasheesh. New York Herald, 1889; also in William James' Psychology, Vol. 2

2. Apparatus for Rapid and Prolonged Washing of Precipitates. Jour. Anal. Chem., Vol. IV, Part 4, 1890

3. Combustion of Gas Jets Under Pressure. Amer. Jour. Science, 41 (1891), 477

4. Effects of Pressure on Ice. Amer. Jour. Science, 41 (1891), 30

5. The Action of Salts on Acids. Amer. Chem. Jour., 15 (1893), 663

6. The Affinity Constants of Weak Acids and the Hydrolysis of Salts. Amer. Chem. Jour., 16 (1894), 313

7. Eine einfache Methode, die Dauer von Torsionsschwingungen zu bestimmen. Wied. Ann. 56 (1895), 171

8. Demonstration of Caustics. American Jour. Science, 50 (1895), 301

9. On the Dissociation Degree of Some Electrolytes at 0°. Phil. Mag., 41 (1896), 117; Zeit. f. phys. Chem., 18, (1895), 521

10. The Duration of the Flash of Exploding Oxyhydrogen. Phil. Mag., 41 (1895), 120

11. A Duplex Mercurial Air-Pump. Phil. Mag., 41 (1896), 387; Wied. Ann., 58 (1896), 206

12. Note on "Focus Tubes" for Producing X-rays. Phil. Mag., 41 (1896), 382

13. Ueber eine neue Form der Quecksilbe luftpumpe und die Erhaltung eines guten Vacuums bei Rontgen'schen Versuchen. Wied. Ann., 58 (1896), 205

14. On the Absorption Spectrum of Solutions of Iodine and Bromine Above the Critical Temperature. Phil. Mag., 41 (1896), 423; Zs. phys. Chem., 19 (1896), 689

15. Experimental Determination of the Temperature in Geissler Tubes. Phys. Rev., 4 (1896), 191; Wied. Ann., 59, 238 (1896)

16. The X-ray Arc. Electrician, 38 (1896), 289, 371

17. Lecture-Room Demonstration of Orbits of Bodies Under the Action of a Central Attraction. Phys. Rev., 4 (1896), 413

18. Demonstration of the Doppler Effect. Phys. Rev., 4 (1896), 504

19. A New Form of Cathode Discharge and the Production of X-rays, Together with Some Notes on Diffraction. Phys. Rev., 5 (1897), 1

20. Apparatus for Illustrating Potential Gradient. Phys. Rev., 6 (1898), 164

21. Apparatus for Showing the Conductivity of Gases. Phys. Rev., 6 (1898), 165

22. Phase-Reversal Zone-Plates and Diffraction Telescope. Phil. Mag., 45 (1898), 511

23. Equilibrium Figures Formed by Floating Magnets. Phil. Mag., 46 (1898), 162

24. The Anomalous Dispersion of Cyanin. Phil. Mag., 46 (1898), 380

25. Some Experiments on Artificial Mirages and Tornadoes. Phil. Mag., 47 (1899), 349

26. An Application of the Diffraction Grating to Colour Photography. Phil. Mag., 47 (1899), 368

27. Photography of Sound Waves by the "Schlieren Methode." Phil. Mag., 48 (1899), 218

28. Dark Lightning. Nature, Sept. 14, 1899, 460

29. Diffraction Process of Color Photography. Science, 9 (1899), 859; Photog. Jour., 24 (1900), 256; Jour. Soc. Arts., (1900), 285

30. On the Cause of Dark Lightning and the Clayden Effect. Jour. Phot. Soc., Phila., Nov. 8, 1899, 69

31. Zone Plate Photography. Photog. Jour., 24 (1900), 248

32. Photography of Sound Waves. Photog. Jour. of Roy. Photo. Soc. London., 24 (1900), 250

33. An Application of the Method of Striae to the Illumination of Objects Under the Microscope. Phil. Mag., 50 (1900), 347

34. The Photography of Sound Waves and the Demonstration of the Evolutions of Reflected Wave Fronts with the Cinematograph. Phil. Mag., 50 (1900), 148; Smithsonian Report for 1900 (1901) 359; Chem. News, 81 (1900), 103; Proc. Roy. Soc., A 66 (1900), 283

35. Artificial Representation of a Total Solar Eclipse. Nature, 63 (1901), 250; Science, 13 (1901), 65

36. Vortex Rings. Nature, 63 (1901), 458

37. Pseudoscopic Vision Without a Pseudoscope. Nature, 64 (1901), 351; Science, 14 (1901), 185

38. The Anomalous Dispersion of Cyanin (with C. E. Magnusson). Phil. Mag., 1 (1901), 36

39. The Problem of the Daylight Observation of the Corona. Astrophys. Jour., 12 (1901), 281

40. The Nature of the Solar Corona. Astrophys. Jour., 13 (1901), 68

41. The Anomalous Dispersion of Carbon. Phil. Mag., 1 (1901), 405

42. On the Propagation of Cusped Waves and Their Relation to the Primary and Secondary Focal Lines. Phil. Mag., 1 (1901), 589

43. On the Production of a Bright-Line Spectrum by Anomalous Dispersion and Its Application to the "Flash-Spectrum." Phil. Mag., 1 (1901), 551; Naturwissensch. Rundschau, 16 (1901), 394; Astrophys. Jour., 13 (1901), 63

44. On Cyanine Prisms and a New Method of Exhibiting Anomalous Dispersion. Phil. Mag., 1 (1901), 624

45. A Mica Echelon Grating. Phil. Mag., 1 (1901), 627

46. Anomalous Dispersion of Sodium Vapour. Proc. Roy. Soc., 69 (1901), 157

47. On the Fluorescence and Absorption Spectrum of Sodium Vapour. Phil. Mag., 3 (1902), 359

48. A Suspected Case of Resonance of Minute Metallic Particles for Light Waves. Phil. Mag., 3 (1902), 396

49. Surface Colour. Phys. Rev., 14 (1902), 315

50. Prisms and Plates for Showing Dichromatism. Phys. Rev., 15 (1902), 121

51. The Invisibility of Transparent Objects. Phys. Rev., 15 (1902), 123

52. Absorption, Dispersion, and Surface Colour of Selenium. Phil. Mag., 3 (1902), 607

53. Production of a Magnetic Field by a Flight of Charged Particles. Phil. Mag., 3 (1902), 659

54. Cooling of Gases by Expansion. Science, 16 (1902), 592

55. The Kinetic Theory of the Expansion of Compressing Gas into a Vacuum. Science, 16 (1902), 909

56. On a Remarkable Case of Uneven Distribution of Light in a Diffraction Grating Spectrum. Phil. Mag., 4 (1902), 396

57. On the Electrical Resonance of Metal Particles for Light Waves. Second Communication. Phil. Mag., 4 (1902), 425; Phys. Zs., 4 (1903), 338

58. The Clayden Effect and the Reversal of Spectrum Lines. Phil. Mag., 4 (1902), 606

59. Screens Transparent Only to Ultra-Violet Light and Their Use in Spectrum Photography. Phil. Mag., 5 (1903), 257; Phys. Zs., 4 (1903), 337; Astrophys. Jour., 17 (1903), 133

60. On Photographic Reversals in Spectrum Photographs. Explanation of Dark Lightning. Astrophys. Jour., 17 (1903), 361

61. On the Anomalous, Dispersion, Absorption and Surface Colour of Nitrosodimethyl Aniline with a Note on the Dispersion of Toluine. Phil. Mag., 6 (1903), 96; Proc. Am. Acad. Arts and Sci., 39 (1903), 51

62. Electrical Resonance of Metal Particles for Light Waves. Third Communication. Phil. Mag., 6 (1903), 259

63. Fluorescence and Absorption Spectra of Sodium Vapour (with J. H. Moore). Phil. Mag., 6 (1903), 362; Astrophys. Jour., 18 (1903), 94

64. Some New Cases of Interference and Diffraction. Phil. Mag., 8 (1904), 376

65. The Achromatization of Approximately Monochromatic Interference Fringes by a Highly Dispersive Medium, and the Consequent Increase in the Allowable Path-difference (with a note by Lord Rayleigh). Phil. Mag., 8 (1904), 324

66. Scintillations of Radium. Science, 19 (1904), 195

67. The N Rays (Letter exposing delusion). Nature, 70 (1904), 530

68. A Quantitative Determination of the Anomalous Dispersion of Sodium Vapour in the Visible and Ultra-Violet Regions. Phil. Mag., 8 (1904), 293; Phys. Zs., 5 (1904), 751; Am. Acad. Arts Sci., 40 (1904), 365

69. Apparatus to Illustrate the Pressure of Sound Waves. Phys. Rev., 20 (1905), 113; Phys. Zs., 6 (1905), 22

70. Intensity of Grating Spectra. Astrophys. Jour., 21 (1905), 173; Phys. Zs., 6 (1905), 238

71. The Magnetic Rotation of Sodium Vapor (with H. W. Springsteen). Phys. Rev., 21 (1905), 41

72. Physical Optics (Textbook). Macmillan Company, New York. London, 1905

73. The Scintillations Produced by Radium. Phil. Mag., 10 (1905), 427

74. The Magneto-Optics of Sodium Vapour and the Rotatory Dispersion Formula. Phil. Mag., 10 (1905), 408

75. The Fluorescence of Sodium Vapour and the Resonance Radiation of Electrons. Phil. Mag., 10 (1905), 513

76. Anomalous Dispersion of the Magnetic Rotation of the Plane of Polarization. Phil. Mag., 10 (1905), 725; Phys. Zs., 6 (1905), 416

77. The Meteorological Optics of Prof. J. M. Pernter: Review. Monthly Weather Review, 1906

78. Fluorescence and Magnetic Rotation Spectra of Sodium Vapor, and Their Analysis. Phil. Mag., 12 (1906), 499; Proc. Amer. Acad. Arts Sci., 42 (1906), 235

79. Fluorescence and Lambert's Law. Phil. Mag., 11 (1906), 782

80. Interference Colours of Chlorate of Potash Crystals and a New Method of Isolating Heat Waves. Phil. Mag., 12 (1906), 67

81. Fish-Eye Views and Vision Under Water. Phil. Mag., 12 (1906), 159

82. Bemerkung über die Selbstumkehrung der Wasserstofflinien. Phys. Zs., 7 (1906), 926

83. Fluorescence, Magnetic Rotation and Temperature Emission Spectra of Iodine Vapour. Phil. Mag., 12 (1906), 329

84. The Intensification of Glass Diffraction Gratings and the Diffraction Process of Colour Photography. Phil. Mag., 12 (1906), 585

85. Abnormal Polarization and Colour of Light Scattered by Small Absorbing Particles. Phil. Mag., 12 (1906), 147

86. Atlas of Absorption Spectra (with H. S. Uhler). Carnegie Institution Publication, 71 (1907)

87. Eine Interferenz methode zur Auffindung von Gesetzmässigkeiten in linienreichen Spektren. Phys. Zs., 8 (1907), 607

88. Die Temperaturstrahlung des Joddampfes. Phys. Zs., 8 (1907), 517

89. Ein einfaches Wassergeblase zum Betriebe von Gebläselampen. Phys. Zs., 8 (1907), 517

90. A Simple Treatment of the Secondary Maxima of Grating Spectra. Phil. Mag., 14 (1907), 477

91. Modification in the Appearance and Position of an Absorption Band Resulting from the Presence of a Foreign Gas. Astrophys. Jour., 26 (1907), 41

92. The Magnetic Rotation of Sodium Vapour at the D Lines. Phil. Mag., 14 (1907), 145

93. A Hydraulic Analogy of Radiating Bodies for Illustrating the Luminosity of the Welsbach Mantle. Phys. Rev., 24 (1907), 436; Nature, 75 (1907), 558

94. Note on the Photography of Very Faint Spectra. (Increased sensitivity of plate by pre-exposure.) Astrophys. Jour., 27 (1908), 379

95. Polarized Fluorescence of Metallic Vapors and the Solar Corona. Astrophys. Jour., 28 (1908), 75

96. Anomalous Magnetic Rotatory Dispersion of Neodymium. Phil. Mag., 15 (1908), 270

97. On the Existence of Positive Electrons in the Sodium Atom. Phil. Mag., 15 (1908), 274

98. The Resonance Spectra of Sodium Vapour. Phil. Mag., 15 (1908), 581

99. On the Emission of Polarized Light by Fluorescent Gases. Phil. Mag., 16 (1908), 184

100. On a Method of Showing Fluorescent Absorption Directly if It Exists. (Disproving claims of certain observers.) Phil. Mag., 16 (1908), 940

101. An Extension of the Principal Series of the Sodium Spectrum. Phil. Mag., 16 (1908), 945

102. The Fluorescence and Magnetic Rotation Spectra of Potassium Vapor (with T. S. Carter). Phys. Rev., 27 (1908), 107

103. The Resonance and Magnetic Rotation Spectra of Sodium Vapor Photographed with the Concave Grating (with F. E. Hackett). Astrophys. Jour., 30 (1909), 339

104. The Complete Principal Series in the Sodium Spectrum (50 lines). Astrophys. Jour., 29 (1909), 97

105. The Mercury Paraboloid as a Reflecting Telescope. Astrophys. Jour., 29 (1909), 164

106. The Selective Reflexion of Monochromatic Light by Mercury Vapor. Phil. Mag., 18 (1909), 187

107. The Damping of Mercury Waves. Phil. Mag., 18 (1909), 194

108. The Absorption, Fluorescence, Magnetic Rotation and Anomalous Dispersion of Mercury Vapour. Phil. Mag., 18 (1909), 240

109. On the Flow of Energy in a System of Interference Fringes. Phil. Mag., 18 (1909), 250

110. The Ultra-violet Absorption, Fluorescence, and Magnetic Rotation of Sodium Vapour. Phil. Mag., 18 (1909), 530

111. High Purity Interference Phenomena of Chlorate of Potash Crystals. Phil. Mag., 18 (1909), 535

112. Talbot's Fringes and the Echelon Grating. Phil. Mag., 18 (1909), 758

113. Note on the Theory of the Greenhouse. Phil. Mag., 17 (1909), 319

114. The Ultra-violet Absorption Spectra of Certain Metallic Vapors and Their Mixtures (with D. V. Guthrie). Astrophys. Jour., 29 (1909), 211

115. The Moon in Ultra-violet Light, and Spectro-selenography. Popular Astronomy, No. 172 (1910); Monthly Notices, Roy. Astr. Soc., 70 (1919), 226

116. Lichtschwebungen und Dopplereffekt. Phys. Zs., 11 (1910), 503, 671, 851

117. Optische Täuschungen und doppelte Umkehrung von Spektrallinien. Phys. Zs., 11 (1910), 822

118. Determination of Stellar Velocities with the Objective Prism. Astrophys. Jour., 31 (1910), 376

119. Additional Notes on Radial Velocities with Objective Prism. Astrophys. Jour., 31 (1910), 460

120. Determination of Absolute Wavelengths with Objective Prisms (with E. C. Pickering). Harv. College Obs. Circ., 154 (1910)

121. Isolierung langwelliger Wärmestrahlung durch Quarzlinsen (with H. Rubens). Sitz. phys. math. Cl., Dec. 1910, 1122

122. The Cathode-Ray Fluorescence of Sodium Vapor (with R. H. Galt). Astrophys. Jour., 33 (1911), 72

123. Nickeled Glass Reflectors for Celestial Photography. Astrophys. Jour., 34 (1911), 404

124. A New Radiant Emission from the Spark. Phil. Mag., 20 (1910), 707; Phys. Zs., 11 (1910), 823

125. Some Experiments on Refraction by Non-homogeneous Media. Phil. Mag., 20 (1910), 712

126. The Echelette Grating for the Infra-red. Phil. Mag., 20 (1910), 770

127. Groove-Form and Energy Distribution of Diffraction Gratings (with Augustus Trowbridge). Phil. Mag., 20 (1910), 886

128. Note on Infra-red Investigations with the Echelette Grating (with Augustus Trowbridge). Phil. Mag., 20 (1910), 898

129. Focal Isolation of Long Heat-Waves (with H. Rubens). Phil. Mag., 21 (1911), 249

130. Recent Experiments with Invisible Light. A "Friday Evening Discourse." Roy. Inst. Gt. Bt. (1911), 1

131. The Resonance Spectra of Iodine. Phil. Mag., 21 (1911), 261

132. Transformation of a Resonance Spectrum into a Band Spectrum by Presence of Helium (with J. Franck). Phil. Mag., 21 (1911), 265

133. The Destruction of the Fluorescence of Iodine and Bromine Vapour by Other Gases. Phil. Mag., 21 (1911), 309

134. The Influence upon the Fluorescence of Iodine and Mercury of Gases with Different Affinities for Electrons (with J. Franck). Phil. Mag., 21 (1911), 314

135. The Resonance Spectra of Iodine Vapour and Their Destruction by Gases of the Helium Group. Phil. Mag., 22 (1911), 469

136. Bemerkungen zu der A. Heurungschen Arbeit: Untersuchungen über die magneto-optischen Effekte bei Chlor und Jod. Ann. d. Phys., 37 (1912), 594

137. Diffraction Gratings with Controlled Groove Form and Abnormal Distribution of Intensity. Phil. Mag., 23 (1912), 310; Phys. Zs., 13 (1912), 261

138. Selective Reflexion, Scattering and Absorption by Resonating Gas Molecules. Phil. Mag., 23 (1912), 689; Phys. Zs., 13 (1912), 353

139. Preliminary Note on the Electron Atmospheres of Metals. Phil. Mag., 24 (1912), 316

140. Resonance Spectra of Iodine by Multiplex Excitation. Phil. Mag., 24 (1912), 673; Phys. Zs., 14 (1913), 177

141. Kritische Bermerkung zu der Arbeit des Herrn Steubing über die strahlende Emission seitens des Funken. Phys. Zs., 13 (1912), 32

142. Selective Absorption of Light on the Moon's Surface and Lunar Petrography. Astrophys. Jour., 36 (1912), 75

143. Method of Obtaining Very Narrow Absorption Lines for Investigations in Magnetic Fields (with P. Zeeman). Phys. Zs., 14 (1913), 405

144. On the Imprisonment of Radiation by Total Reflexion. Phil. Mag., 25 (1913), 449; Phys. Zs., 14 (1913), 270

145. The Selective Dispersion of Mercury Vapour at the 2536 Absorption Line. Phil. Mag., 25 (1913), 433; Phys. Zs., 14 (1913), 191

146. Resonance Experiments with the Longest Heat-Waves. Phil. Mag., 25 (1913), 440; Phys. Zs., 14 (1913), 189

147. The Satellites of the Mercury Lines. Phil. Mag., 25 (19,3), 443; Phys. Zs., 14 (1913), 273

148. On the Use of the Interferometer for the Study of Band Spectra. Phil. Mag., 26 (1913), 176. Cf. No. 87

149. Resonance Spectra of Iodine Under High Dispersion. Phil. Mag., 26 (1913), 828; Phys. Zs., 14 (1913), 1189

150. Polarisation of the Light of Resonance Spectra. Phil. Mag., 26 (1913), 846; Phys. Zs., 14 (1913), 1200

151. Researches in physical optics; with especial reference to the radiation of electrons) Part I. Columbia University Press, 1913.

152. Ratio of the Intensities of the D-Lines of Sodium. Phys. Zs., 15 (1914) , 382

153. Photometric Investigation of the Superficial Resonance of Sodium Vapour (with L. Dunoyer). Phil. Mag., 27 (1914), 1025

154. Photometric Study of the Fluorescence of Iodine (with W. P. Speas). Phil. Mag., 27 (1914), 531; Phys. Zs., 15 (1914), 317

155. Separation of Close Spectrum Lines for Monochromatic Illumination. Phil. Mag., 27 (1914), 524; Phys. Zs., 15 (1914), 313

156. Intense Sodium Flame. Phil. Mag., 27 (1914), 530

157. Radiation of Gas Molecules Excited by Light. Proc. London Phys. Soc., 26 (1914), 185

158. Fluorescence of Gases Excited by Ultra Schumann Waves (with G. A. Hemsalech). Phil. Mag., 27 (1914), 899

159. The Separate Excitation of the Centers of Emission of the D-Lines of Sodium (with L. Dunoyer). Phil. Mag., 27 (1914), 1018

160. Magneto-Optics of Iodine Vapour (with G. Ribaud). Phil. Mag., 27 (1914), 1009; Phys. Zs., 15 (1915), 650; Jour. de Phys., 4 (1914), 378

161. Experimental Determination of the Law of Reflexion of Gas Molecules. Phil. Mag., 30 (1915), 300

162. The Effect of Electric and Magnetic Fields on the Emission Lines of Solids (with C. E. Mendanhall). Phil. Mag., 30 (1915), 316

163. Nickelled Glass Mirrors for Ultra-Violet Photography. Astro-phys. Jour., 42 (1915), 365

164. Further Study of the Fluorescence Produced by Ultra-Schumann Rays (with C. F. Meyer). Phil. Mag., 30 (1915), 449

165. Principal Series of Sodium (with R. Fortrat). Astrophys. Jour., 43 (1916), 72

166. Monochromatic Photographs of Jupiter and Saturn. Astrophys. Jour., 43 (1916), 310

167. Scattering and Regular Reflection of Light by an Absorbing Gas (with M. Kimura). Phil. Mag., 32 (1916), 329

168. Condensation and Reflection of Gas Molecules. Phil. Mag., 32 (1916), 364

169. Ionising Potential of Sodium Vapour (with S. Okano). Phil. Mag., 34 (1917), 177

170. Band and Line Spectra of Iodine (with M. Kimura). Astrophys. Jour., 46 (1917), 181

171. Zeeman-effect for Complex Lines of Iodine (with M. Kimura). Astrophys. Jour., 46 (1917), 197

172. Resonance Spectra of Iodine. Phil. Mag., 35 (1918), 236

173. Series Law of Resonance Spectra (with M. Kimura). Phil. Mag., 35 (1918), 252

174. Scattering of Light by Air Molecules. Phil. Mag., 36 (1918), 272

175. Ultra-Violet Light of High Intensity as Beacons and for Secret Signals in War-time. (A complete disclosure of the method of producing what is now called "black light," and a description of its properties and possible uses.) Jour. de Phys. (Paris), 9 (1919), 77. In the same number Wood's apparatus for the determination of the time interval between electrical contact and explosion of machine gun cartridges, exploded electrically and synchronized to fire through airplane propeller, is described by de Watteville.

176. Invisible Light in Warfare. London Phys. Soc. Proc., 31 (1919), 232

177. Resonance Radiation of Sodium Vapour Excited by One of the D-Lines (with F. L. Mohler). Phil. Mag., 37 (1919), 456; Phys. Rev., 11 (1918), 70

178. Optical Properties of Homogeneous and Granular Films of Sodium and Potassium. Phil. Mag., 38 (1919), 98

179. Researches in physical optics; with especial reference to the radiation of electrons) Part II. Columbia University Press, 1919.

180. Light Scattering by Air and the Blue Colour of the Sky. Phil. Mag., 39 (1920), 423

181. Extension of the Balmer Series of Hydrogen, and Spectroscopic Phenomena of Very Long Vacuum Tubes. Proc. Roy. Soc., 97 (1920), 455

182. The Fluorescence of Mercury Vapor (with J. S. van der Lingen). Astrophys. Jour., 54 (1921), 149

183. The Time Interval Between Absorption and Emission of Light in Fluorescence. Proc. Roy. Soc., 99 (1921), 362

184. On Hydrogen Spectra from Long Vacuum Tubes. Phil. Mag., 42 (1921), 729

185. Fluorescence and Photochemistry. Phil. Mag., 43 (1922), 757

186. Atomic Hydrogen and the Balmer Series Spectrum. Phil. Mag., 44 (1922), 538

187. Selective Reflection of λ 2536 by Mercury Vapour. Phil. Mag., 44 (1922), 1105

188. Polarised Resonance Radiation of Mercury Vapour. Phil. Mag., 44 (1922), 1107

189. Spontaneous Incandescence of Substances in Atomic Hydrogen Gas. Proc. Roy. Soc., 102 (1922), 1

190. Destruction of the Polarisation of Resonance Radiation by Weak Magnetic Fields (with A. Ellett). Nature, 111 (1923), 255

191. On the Influence of Magnetic Fields on the Polarisation of Resonance Radiation (with A. Ellett). Proc. Roy. Soc., A 103 (1923), 396

192. Vacuum Grating Spectrograph and the Zinc Spectrum. Phil. Mag., 46 (1923), 741

193. Dialysis of Small Volumes of Liquid. The Lily-pad Dialyser. J. Phys. Chem., 27 (1923), 565

194. Controlled Orbital Transfers of Electrons in Optically Excited Mercury Atoms. Proc. Roy. Soc., 106 A (1924), 679

195. An Experimental Study of Grating Errors and "Ghosts." Phil. Mag., 48 (1924), 497

196. Polarised Resonance Radiation in Weak Magnetic Fields (with A. Ellett). Phys. Rev., 24 (1924), 243

197. Fine Structure, Absorption and Zeeman Effect of the 2536 Mercury Line. Phil. Mag., 50 (1925), 761; Nature, 115 (1925), 461

198. Optical Excitation of the Mercury Spectrum. Phil. Mag., 50 (1925), 774

199. Improved Grating for Vacuum Spectrographs (with Th. Lyman). Phil. Mag., 2 (1926), 310

200. Structure of Cadmium and Zinc Resonance Lines. Phil. Mag., 2 (1926), 611

201. Self-Reversal of the Red Hydrogen Line. Phil. Mag., 2 (1926), 876

202. Optical Excitation of Mercury with Controlled Radiating States and Forbidden Lines. Phil. Mag., 4 (1927), 466

203. The Physical and Biological Effects of High Frequency Sound Waves of Great Intensity (with A. L. Loomis). Phil. Mag., 4 (1927), 417. At the end of this paper is clearly disclosed what is now called "electric-fever"; namely, the heating of animals in high-frequency electric fields

204. Variation of Intensity Ratios of Optically Excited Spectrum Lines with the Intensity of the Exciting Light. Nature, 120 (1927), 725

205. Spectra of High-frequency Discharges in Super-vacuum Tubes (with A. L. Loomis), Nature, 120 (1927), 510

206. Rotational Structure of the Blue-Green Bands of Na₂ (with F. W. Loomis). Phys. Rev., 31 (1928), 1126; Phys. Rev., 32 (1928), 223

207. Optically Excited Iodine Bands with Alternate Missing Lines (with F. W. Loomis). Phil. Mag., 6 (1928), 231; Phys. Rev., 31 (1928), 705; Nature, 121 (1928), 283

208. Fluorescence of Mercury Vapour (with V. Voss). Nature, 121 (1928), 418; Proc. Roy. Soc., 119 (1928), 698

209. Factors Which Determine the Occurrence of the "Green-Ray." Nature, 121 (1928), 501

210. Factors Governing the Appearance of the "Forbidden Line" 2656 (with E. Gaviola). Phil. Mag., 6 (1928), 271

211. Wave-length Shifts in Scattered Light. Nature, 122 (1928), 349

212. The Fluorescence Spectrum of Sodium Vapor in the Vicinity of the D Lines (with E. L. Kinsey). Phys. Rev., 31 (1928), 793

213. New Effects in the Optical Excitation of Vapours. J. Frank. Inst., 205 (1928), 481

214. Anti-Stokes Radiation of Fluorescent Liquids. Phil. Mag., 6 (1928), 310

215. Power Relation of the Intensities of the Lines in the Optical Excitation of Mercury (with E. Gaviola). Phil. Mag., 6 (1928), 352

216. Raman Spectra of Scattered Radiation. Phil. Mag., 6 (1928), 729

217. Photosensitised Band Fluorescence of OH, HgH, NH, H₂O and NH₃, Molecules (with E. Gaviola). Phil. Mag., 6 (1928), 1191; Phys. Rev., 31 (1928), 1109

218. Raman Lines Under High Dispersion. Phil. Mag., 6 (1928), 1282

219. Excitation of the Raman Effect. J. Frank. Inst., 208 (1929), 617

220. Raman Effect in Gases I, HCl and NH₃. Phil. Mag., 7 (1929), 744; Nature, 123 (1929), 166, 279

221. Raman Effect by Helium Excitation. Phil. Mag., 7 (1929), 858

222. Chromium Echelette Gratings for Infra-Red. Phil. Mag., 7 (1929), 742

223. Ozone Absorption During Long Arctic Night. Nature, 123 (1929), 644

224. Densitometer Curves of the Green Mercury Line. Phil. Mag., 8 (1929), 205

225. Molecular Spectra and Molecular Structure. Part II, Excitation of Raman Spectra. Trans. Far. Soc., 25 (1929), 792

226. Spectra of High Frequency Discharge in O₂ and CO. Phil. Mag., 8 (1929), 207

227. Raman Lines of Mercury in Arc Improbable. (Criticism of reported results.) Nature, 125 (1930), 464

228. Plasmoidal H. F. Oscillatory Discharges in "Non-Conducting" Vacua. Phys. Rev., 35 (1930), 673

229. Raman Effect in HCl Gas (with G. H. Dieke). Phys. Rev., 35 (1930), 1355

230. Improved Technique for the Raman Effect. Phys. Rev., 33 (1929), 294; 36 (1930), 1421

231. Raman Spectra of Benzene and Diphenyl. Phys. Rev., 36 (1930), 1431

232. Ball Lightning. Nature, 126 (1930), 723

233. Stereophotographic Models of Electron Motion in Stark Effect. Phys. Rev., 38 (1931), 346

234. Selective Thermal Radiation of Coloured and Pure Fused Quartz. (Quartz Containing Neodymium). Phys. Rev., 38 (1931), 487

235. Nuclear Spin of Potassium (with F. W. Loomis). Phys. Rev., 38 (1931), 854

236. Absorption Spectra of Salts in Liquid Ammonia. Phys. Rev., 38 (1931), 1648

237. Raman Effect for Benzene Substitution Products. Phys. Rev., 38 (1931), 2168

238. Analysis of Complicated Band Spectra with the Aid of Magnetic Rotation Spectra (with G. H. Dieke). Nature, 128 (1931), 545

239. Raman Spectra of a Series of Normal Alcohols and Other Compounds (with G. Collins) Phys. Rev., 42 (1932), 386

240. Remarkable Optical Properties of the Alkali Metals. Phys. Rev., 44 (1933), 353; 43 (1933), 779, 1052

241. Influence of Nitrogen and Carbon Dioxide upon the Absorption Spectrum of Mercury Vapor (with H. W. Straub) Phys. Rev., 44 (1933), 1030

242. Raman Spectrum of Heavy Water. Nature, 133 (1934), 106; Phys. Rev., 45 (1934), 392

243. Raman Spectrum of Heavy-Water Vapor. Phys. Rev., 45 (1934), 732

244. Ultra-Violet Absorption of Heavy Water Vapour (with J. Franck) Phys. Rev.45 (1934), 667

245. Comment on Paper by Langsdorf and Dullridge on Optical Rotation of Unpolarized Light. J. Opt. Soc. Amer., 24 (1934), 4

246. The Purple Gold of Tut-Ankhamun. Brit. J. Egyp. Arch., 20 (1934), 62

247. Physical optics, 3^rd edition (1934). London & New York: Macmillan

248. Raman Spectrum of Heavy Chloroform (with D. H. Rank). Phys. Rev., 47 (1935), 792; 48 (1935), 63

249. Far Ultra-Violet Absorption Spectra and Ionisation Potentials of Benzenes C₆H₆ and C₆D₆ (with W. C. Price). J. Chem. Phys., 3 (1935), 439

250. Raman Spectrum of Heavy Benzene C₆D₆. J. Chem. Phys., 3 (1935) 444; Phys. Rev., 48 (1935), 488

251. Anomalous Diffraction Gratings. Phys. Rev., 48 (1935), 928

252. Fluorescence of Chlorophyll in Its Relation to Photochemical Processes in Plants and Organic Solutions. (with J. Franck). J. Chem. Phys., 4 (1936), 551

253. Optical and Physical Effects of High Explosives. Proc. Roy. Soc, 157 A (1936), 249

254. Raman Spectra of Deuteroparaldehyde and Paraldchyde. J. Chem. Phys., 5 (1937), 287

255. Recent Improvements in Diffraction Gratings and Replicas. Nature, 140 (1937), 723

256. Spectrum of the Arc in Hydrogen (with G. H. Dieke). Phys. Rev., 53 (1938), 146

257. Optical Properties of Alkali Metals (with C. Lukens). Phys. Rev., 54 (1938), 332

258. Negative Bands of N¹⁴ - N¹⁵ (with G. H. Dieke). J. Chem. Phys., 6 (1938), 734

259. Nuclear Spin of N¹⁵ (with G. H. Dicke). J. Chem. Phys., 6 (1938), 308

260. Supersonics, the Science of Inaudible Sounds. The Colver Lectures, Brown University, 1939.  Providence: Brown University, 1939. (Popular level book but very influential in the new science of ultrasonics).

261. The Negative Bands of the Heavy Nitrogen Molecule (with G. H. Dieke). J. Chem. Phys., 8 (1940), 351

262. Fire-fly "Spinthariscope". Nature, 144 (1939), 381

263. Presence of a Hitherto Unrecognized Nicotinic Acid Derivative in Human Urine (with V. A. Najjar). Proc. Soc. Exp. Biology and Medicine, 44 (1940), 386

264. Diffraction Gratings for Astro-physical Research. Astrophys. Journ., Dec. 1941

265. Animated Crystals of Proto-catechuic Acid. J. Chem. Phys., Dec. 1941

266. Improved Diffraction Gratings and Replicas.  J. Opt. Soc. Amer., 34 (1944), 509

267. The Use of Echelette Gratings in High Orders. J. Opt. Soc. Amer., 37 (1947), 733

268. Spontaneous Deformation of Protocatechuic Acid Crystals. Proc. Roy. Soc. A., 197 (1949), 283

A separate book might be written about the father, who if he were still alive would not be taking this aspersion lying down. He was born April 22, 1803, and had been twice around the Horn before 1840. This was in the days when “Died in Pernambuco” occurred on the tombstones of bodies which had been brought home to Nantucket, New Bedford, and Boston. The South Pacific was a suburb of New England towns whose railed cupolas looked out over the sea. This grand old scholar and adventurer, worthy sire of a great, fantastic son, was born in Stowe, Maine, son of Joseph Wood and Betsy Williams; graduated from Waterville College (now Colby University) 1829, and from Bowdoin College Medical School 1832. Sailed from Boston for Hawaiian Islands October, 1838, arrived April, 1839 (around the Horn). By appointment of the American Consul was for ten years in charge of the American Hospital for Seamen in Honolulu. For twenty years subsequently was engaged in the growing and manufacture of sugar, a pioneer and the first financially successful one, in the introduction of this industry into the Hawaiian Islands. He retired from the Islands in 1866 and retired from all business in 1879. Married (June 4, 1833) Delia Morse, daughter of Samuel A. Morse, for many years Collector of Customs at Machias and subsequently of Eastport, Maine. Second marriage was to Lucy Jane Davis (October 31, 1864), daughter of Charles B. Davis of Concord, Massachusetts. They lived in Honolulu for two years, then a year in Europe. Robert, Junior, was born May 2, 1868, in the Davis home in Concord. They lived in Concord for four years in the Davis home, as Grandmother Davis was a bedridden invalid. After her death, they moved to Jamaica Plain, a suburb of Boston. In 1868, year of Wood, Junior’s, birth, Dr. Wood, Senior, again sailed for Honolulu. His ostensible purpose was to collect biological material for Louis Agassiz, of which he brought back plenty before the year was out — but it amuses me to imagine that he may have been fleeing from the “lusty lungs” of his Gargantuan son. Those lungs still contain a lot of noble wind about the father. I wanted to hold the father in a footnote, and am still trying to, but here’s what Wood added—and there’s still more to come. While Wood, Senior, was in charge of the American Hospital for Seamen at Honolulu, a Russian warship anchored and the admiral came ashore. The admiral was entertained frequently by Dr. Wood. On the night of their last dinner, they exchanged keepsakes — a little gift from Dr. Wood to the admiral, and a little gift from the admiral to Dr. Wood. Next morning Wood received with the admiral’s compliments a valuable book which he’d chanced to admire on the flagship. These Woods are well bred, but tough. Wood tore from the wall and boxed up an oil painting which was worth five times as much as the book — and which the admiral had chanced to admire. Wood had his servant deliver it to a petty officer with instructions that it was not to be given the admiral until the ship had cleared port. The ship duly cleared —but put about and dropped anchor off Diamond Head. A cutter came ashore and a box was handed to the harbor master, addressed to Dr. Wood. It contained a cup of solid platinum, worth many times its weight in gold. The warship had meanwhile weighed anchor and disappeared. The father of Wood, perhaps for the only time in his life, was licked. Here comes the last of his father, and if it doesn’t give you goose flesh, it’s because I can’t write. Wood, Senior, lay sick abed in 1892, at the age of ninety. Old age was his only illness. But old age had laid its hand upon him. After a number of days, he arose on his pillow and said in a loud, strong voice, "I want to give up the ghost!” He lay back and died of old age with a terrible if unconventional dignity which gives to think of Captain Ahab and the Whale.

In his notes there kept occurring a story about how when he was 13 years old, his father had taken him in to Boston and bought him for $100 or more, a high-wheeled, man-sized Columbia bicycle. He kept putting it in, and I kept leaving it out. His final plea for its inclusion didn’t impress me. Here’s what he wrote.

“The only excuse for the Columbia bicycle was to illustrate a trait which I inherited from my father, whose reaction in matters of expenditures resulted from a mixture of New England thrift and Hawaiian lavishness. I was conditioned in my youth against extravagance in spending pennies, but have formed no fixation against spending dollars, whether I possess them at the moment or not. Gertrude says I always take a day coach for short trips alone, but engage a drawing-room on The Chief when we go to California. ”

He hasn’t been generally too insistent about what goes in or what comes out, but he was plaintive about the bicycle. It was as if I had taken it away from him. I began finally to understand that this bicycle was very important to him—but couldn’t understand why, since his economic explanations had left me cold, when it belatedly dawned on me that the reason is because he’s still riding it—and will to the day of his death. If after his death he approaches the Pearly Gates, it will be on that bicycle. And he will expect and be given the special welcome he deserves.

“Here comes somebody on a high horse—or high wheel—instead of a kindly but dumb and perhaps foot-weary nobody. ”

This begins to illuminate the combination of always well-bred arrogance, not always so well-bred egocentric impudence and impishness, combined strangely with sweetness and light, which makes this man unique.

Principles of Psychology, by William James. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

He subsequently wrote a long and flattering screed paying tribute to the wonders of the Russian Fair, etc., only to receive from the Examiner a printed rejection slip, with the notation that they hadn’t returned the manuscript because he’d failed to enclose return postage. This cleared his conscience and ended his career—as an international newspaper correspondent.

Wood is frequently introduced to laymen by his scientific colleagues as “the grandfather of Mickey Mouse,” and a curious thing happened only last year (1940) in connection with Mickey Mouse’s Woodian ancestry. The AP carried a story that a professor at Wellesley had “applied the art and technique of Walt Disney” to the projection of animated mathematical drawings and curves. Mickey Mouse technique had completed the circle—beginning as a scientific abstract, and returning via Disney’s famous comics to its source.

Bradford Wood died at the age of two and was buried in the family plot in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Mass.

This was the starting point of some of his most important investigations in what Wood termed “resonance spectra,” for which the theoretical physicists could not even suggest a plausible explanation. With the advent of the Bohr theory of energy levels in atoms and molecules, their explanation was at once evident, and as Wood had foreseen, their study was of the utmost importance in connection with the newer theory of band spectra.

See Chapter Ten.

It was designed for work in the remote infrared region of the spectrum. These were coarse gratings having from 800 to 4,800 lines to the inch ruled with deep saw-tooth grooves in copper. Gratings for work with visible light have from 15,000 to 30,000 lines to the inch ruled on a harder metal, speculum, or aluminum on glass. He carried on a short research with Trowbridge at Princeton in which they examined the behavior and performance of the grating, incidentally resolving the carbon dioxide band at 4.3 μ into a double band, which had never been done before. They did not realize the importance of this discovery at the time, and their paper was overlooked by Bjerrum, whose theory of molecular band spectra published in 1912 predicted a double band in the infrared as a result of a vibration in the molecule combined with its rotation. The double band was rediscovered in 1913 by Eva von Bahr, to whom credit has always been given for proving experimentally the theory of Bjerrum. The band had been pictured and described in the Philosophical Magazine three years before. Bjerrum’s oversight was probably due to the tide of the paper: “Note on Infra-red Investigations with Echelette Gratings.”

Later on, using the same apparatus but employing a mercury arc lamp instead of the Welsbach, Rubens and Von Bayer isolated a radiation having a wave length of 0.3 of a millimeter.

In addition to his medals and awards, Wood has the degree of LL.D. from Clark University, University of Birmingham, England, and Edinburgh University; Ph.D., University of Berlin; is foreign member Royal Society, London; honorary member London Optical Society; corresponding member Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Gottingen; foreign member Accademia dei Lincei, Rome; Russian Academy of Science, Leningrad; member American National Academy of Science, Academy of Arts and Sciences, Philosophical Society, Physical Society; honorary member Royal Institution, London; honorary fellow London Physical Society; foreign member Royal Swedish Academy, Stockholm; foreign member Indian Association for Science, Calcutta.

Among the notable medals for outstanding scientific achievement of which Dr. Wood is the recipient are the following: 1899: medal awarded by the Royal Society of Arts for his diffraction process in color photography; 1907: the Franklin Institute John Scott medal, awarded by the City of Philadelphia for further progress in diffraction color photos; 1909: gold and silver Rumford medals awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for research on the optical properties of metallic vapors; 1910: the J. Traill Taylor medal, awarded for photography by invisible rays; 1918: gold medal, awarded by the Società Italians della Scienze, for general outstanding scientific achievement; 1933: the Frederick Ives medal, awarded by the Optical Society of America for distinguished work in physical optics; 1938: the gold and silver Rumford medals, awarded by the Royal Society, London, for his daring and genius in experimentation; 1940: the Draper gold medal, awarded by the National Academy of Science, Washington, for contributions to astrophysics and spectroscopy.

I managed to dig up, however, an article entitled “Americans and the Royal Society from 1783 to 1937,” written by Heathcote Heindel and published in Science, March 25, 1938, which threw more light on the general subject. Only six American physicists have ever been elected to foreign membership in the Society: 1889: Henry A. Rowland of Johns Hopkins; 1895: Samuel P. Langley of the Smithsonian Institution; 1897: J. Willard Gibbs of Yale; 1902: Albert Abraham Michelson of Chicago; 1919: Robert Williams Wood of Johns Hopkins; 1935: Irving Langmuir of the General Electric Co.

Cotton waste wet with a mixture of two parts of carbon tetrachloride and one part of carbon bisulphide.

As I Remember Him: The Biography of R. S., by Hans Zinsser. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.