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

Foreword

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