Doctor Wood. Modern Wizard of the Laboratory: The Story of an American Small Boy Who Became the Most Daring and Original Experimental Physicist of Our Day-but Never Grew Up

Chapter Twelve. Poet and Author

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.