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 Eighteen. Scientific Detective

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.

Some days after the explosion, Lamont, who had a summer home not far from mine at East Hampton and whom we had known as a neighbor for years, phoned and asked if I would go in to New York the following Monday morning and see if I could find any clues which might lead to the reconstruction of the bomb and the possible apprehension of the perpetrator. This was my first invitation to participate in a criminal investigation, and I doubted that I could be of any help. But Lamont felt differently. He had seen my laboratory in the old barn, had heard me talk about complicated phenomena in physics and the chemistry of explosives. I went down, as requested, and was first introduced to Sherman Burns, son of Detective William J. Burns, then director of the Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice, who had been called in to work with the police.

Sherman took me to police headquarters, where I was ushered into the private office of Captain James J. Gegan, head of the Bomb Squad. Standing in front of me, beside Gegan’s desk, and leaning against the wall like a pair of old cavalry boots, were the two hind legs of the wretched horse which had drawn the cart containing a barrel filled with iron sash weights, with a high explosive bomb packed at its center. Gegan told me all they had found out, which amounted to very little beyond what everybody knew through the newspapers. The Morgan corner had been a shambles of dead and dying men and women. Nobody knew just what had happened. The troops had been called out, and everything was confusion. I asked Captain Gegan if they had subsequently found any fragments of the bomb’s structure or mechanism, since these if identifiable might lead to conclusions concerning the occupation of the perpetrator — might even be traced.

Captain Gegan said, “No. We’ve gone over a cartload of stuff, swept up in the street after the explosion. There were the sash weights, of course, but we’ve gone over the debris with a fine-tooth comb, and there’s nothing identifiable in the heap but parts of the wagon and harness”.

I asked him if he still had the stuff, and he took me into an adjoining room where there was a pile that resembled the dirt and scrap heap behind a blacksmith shop. It didn’t look promising, but I began grubbing. Presently I pounced on a fragment which I felt sure was a part of the bomb. It was a curved fragment of metal which might have been part of a thin-walled iron or steel cylinder, possibly eight inches in diameter. There was a hole in its center. On its outer surface and crossing the hole was a narrow lateral stripe, scored with deep parallel grooves or ridges. I had seen similar grooves on rock surfaces when studying geology at Harvard a quarter of a century earlier, which the professor called “slickensides”, formed on the opposed surfaces of rocks subjected to great pressure and undergoing lateral displacement. I showed this to Gegan, and said, “Here’s a part of the actual bomb”.

After further search, I found not only half a dozen similar fragments, but some pieces of a heavy steel hoop. One of them had a hole the same size as that in the first cylinder fragment and curved to the same degree, so that the hoop must have fitted snugly around the cylinder. Moreover, these hoop fragments were “slickensided” on the inside where they had been pressed in close contact with the outer surface of the cylinder when it had exploded. They had been drawn under heavy pressure against it, and this, as in the case of the rock surfaces studied in geology, had formed the parallel grooves and ridges.

I said to Captain Gegan, “We can now reconstruct the container of the explosive. It was a steel cylinder, probably a long one, eight inches in diameter, bound with steel hoops, fastened to it with rivets or something similar, passing through these holes”.

Furthermore, it seemed to me evident that it must have been originally a staple article or part of some staple article of machinery, extemporized as a container for the explosive. The next problem was to find out where it had come from, whether from a plumber’s shop, an automobile factory, an engine factory, or where. This part, of course, was up to the police. I was overoptimistic perhaps about their skill in running such clues to earth. Captain Gegan asked if I had any further suggestions. I called his attention to the fact that all the iron sash weights had serial numbers and two letters cast in relief on their surfaces. I advised detailing a squad of police to scatter to every iron foundry within a radius of miles, with samples of the window weights, and to see whether any foundry could recognize them or identify their “vintage”. Their age might show whether they came from a building that had been torn down or from a new one in process of construction. These might all be basic clues when suspects began to be rounded up and when their backgrounds, locales, and occupations were checked. I don’t know what obstacles and dead ends the police ran into — but as you know, the perpetrator was never found. Since the police were aided by Burns and by the Department of Justice, and since rewards totaling over $80,000 were offered, it is a mystery they never got anywhere.

Dr. Wood recalls a little argument he had with Burns, Senior, concerning the window weights. Burns felt Wood was wrong in believing they could possibly have come from a new building under construction, or from an old building, either, for that matter. Burns insisted they had been on a junk pile, subjected to the weather for many years. In support of that theory, he pointed to yellowish ingrained discolorations on some of them. “But”, Wood had insisted, “that’s from the sandstone walls of the Morgan bank they hit”.

Young Sherman Burns had said, “That’s just what I told papa”. Subsequent analysis of the discolorations showed that Dr. Wood and Sherman were right.

Some years later Captain Gegan, of the Bomb Squad, wrote a magazine article entitled “How I Reconstructed the Wall Street Bomb”. Dr. Wood never objects, any more than does the fictionally famous “Dr. Thorndyke”, when the police follow up suggestions he has given them and make good use of his ideas as their own. So, indeed, had Captain Gegan reconstructed it — after Wood had found the overlooked fragments and shown him how.

The Wall Street bomb was only a beginning. Wood was later called in to help solve, and did solve, the famous Brady Bomb Case, in Maryland — generally referred to in the annals of mysterious crimes as the Candy-Box Murder. In this case, Dr. Wood not only reconstructed the entire mechanism of the bomb, but turned advisory detective himself, and followed to their ends the clues which brought the murderer to justice.

Both the crime and its solution by Dr. Wood — if one merely pasted together the columns of space devoted to it by the Baltimore and Washington papers, without the inside story given me by Wood himself — had every dramatic element for a super detective novel, in which Dorothy Sayers and Austin Freeman (who invented Wood’s best replica in fiction) might collaborate to put an end to all scientific detective novels — with Lord Peter Wimsey left out. Here’s the true-life story reconstructed with the help of Dr. Wood, supplemented by reference to newspaper files.

Seat Pleasant is a sparsely populated, unimpressive rural hamlet, with modest houses, on the Carmody Road in Maryland, near the District of Columbia line. One of these houses was occupied toward the end of December, 1929, by a Mrs. Anna Buckley, with a family of small children, whose Christmas had been meager. On the evening of the day after Christmas, just before dark, she had chanced to go out on the front porch and remembered later that there was nothing on the porch and nothing near it on the ground. Her front yard was bare clay. Next morning when she went out on the porch again between seven and eight o’clock, there was a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with white string. It looked like a box of candy or cookies or something of the sort, left by a neighbor for her children as a belated Christmas gift. When she picked it up she was disappointed to find written on it, or rather hand printed, in bluish black ink, the name “Naomi Hall”.

She didn’t know anybody named Hall and was tempted to open the package, but being an estimably honest woman decided not to. The children, even more tempted, since they were sure it contained Christmas goodies, were told to “let it alone”, since “it didn’t belong to them”. Mrs. Buckley didn’t bother to lock the package away or hide it from them. They were obedient children — and somebody would almost certainly turn up to claim it before the holidays were over. There was in fact a family of Halls not far away on the same road, and they had an eighteen-year-old daughter named Naomi, but Mrs. Buckley didn’t know of them. Apparently, either they or the Buckleys (the record on this point isn’t clear) had moved there quite recently…

Young Harold Buckley, seven years old, seems, however, to have known all the time who Naomi Hall was. Perhaps he didn’t tell at home because he hoped she’d never claim the candy — and in that case — well, candy would still be candy, no matter how stale. However, on New Year’s morning, when Harold was sent out on an errand and chanced to meet one of the Hall boys, Naomi’s young brother Leslie, his honesty got the better of him, and he said, “There’s a Christmas present, a box of candy or something, for your sister at our house. Somebody left it by mistake”.

This burst of honesty on Harold’s part saved his little life — saved the Buckley household from wreckage and horror.

Leslie got the package later and started home with it, accompanied by a boy named Steuart Carneal.

Naomi Hall was a generous, handsome, even if just then slightly overplump sister, and both boys hoped to share the candy. Naomi took the package to the kitchen table, and the kids, including Leslie, a younger sister Dorothy, and a toddling baby brother Samuel, gathered around her as she opened it. Mrs. Nora Hall, the mother, stood in the background. The Carneal boy was watching through a kitchen window, hoping to be invited in after the package had been opened. Naomi removed the string, took the paper off, and lifted the box’s lid. There was an immediate and terrific explosion. Naomi was literally torn to pieces; Dorothy and baby Samuel were also killed outright. The table and kitchen floor were a mass of wreckage. The explosion had blown a crater in the earth beneath the floor; had also seriously wounded Leslie. Mrs. Hall lay bleeding and unconscious, with an eye and all her teeth destroyed. The Carneal boy, outside the window, had been wounded too.

The explosion brought the whole village, then the police from Washington, which was the nearest metropolis, and later that same day, the police from Baltimore, since the atrocity had occurred in Maryland. Also hearses and ambulances. When Mrs. Hall had regained consciousness, she said, “I was in the kitchen when Leslie brought the package in. We called Naomi to come in and open the box. We were all grouped around the table expecting to see a box of candy and nuts. Then I saw a white flash, and that is all I remember until I was being picked up on the back porch and put in the ambulance”.

The bomb, while containing enough high explosive to wreck a house and massacre a family, had been directed to Naomi in person. But who would have wanted to murder Naomi? And particularly who could have wanted to murder her, yet had known her so slightly that he didn’t even know where she lived! Naomi had been a simple, friendly, attractive country girl, knowing only simple country people like herself. Here indeed, from many angles, and particularly from that of the method which had been used, was an unlikely murder mystery.

Lieutenant Itzel and Detective Schalter of the Baltimore police department, who had active charge of the case, after they’d been called in to help the local constabulary, as Scotland Yard is called to rural districts in England, soon learned that Naomi Hall had been pregnant, and this circumstance, if not a clue, offered at least a first lead to work on. But here, almost immediately, the police came to a sort of double impasse. Naomi Hall had been for some time lawfully married to Herman Brady, a young farmer of the county. The marriage was on record, the young couple were on good terms, as far as anybody knew, and the marriage had been kept a secret from the two families only because Mrs. Brady, Herman’s mother, had opposed it. It meant more mouths to feed. Herman was working his mother’s farm. She was dependent on him, and he hadn’t wanted to tell her about the marriage until he was in a better position to take care of them both. The first impasse confronting the police was the seeming lack of any urgent motivation for murder, even though a baby was expected in a few months. The second impasse was that Herman Brady, a hulking dirt farmer and not a very bright one at that, knew nothing whatever about machinery, mechanics, explosives — never tinkered with gadgets — had never done so in earlier boyhood — had no mechanical ingenuity whatever — couldn’t even mend a broken plow — in short could no more have constructed an infernal machine than have built a rocket to the moon! Of this, the police were absolutely sure, and it turned out they were right.

Everybody agreed that Herman was too dumb to have done it.

“Now if it had been his brother… if it had been Leroy”, said farmers, gossiping around the stove in the general store at Seat Pleasant. “And what about his brother?” the police were soon inquiring. Well, Leroy Brady was the opposite of Herman, they said. Just one of those differences that happen in so many families. Leroy was a sort of mechanical genius. But he was out of the picture. He worked, and lived, in Washington, had a good-looking young wife of his own, saw little of his mother and Herman — probably hadn’t even known Naomi Hall at all. Leroy worked in a big Chevrolet garage — headquarters of the Chevrolet in Washington — and was one of the best mechanics they had. He was known to have displayed great ingenuity in devising mechanical contraptions, including a device for the opening and closing of doors.

The police weren’t quite so sure, when they looked into it, that Leroy was “out of the picture”. Yet they could discover no earthly connection or reason for Leroy Brady to have murdered Naomi Hall — except as a farfetched “favor” to his brother — and what had been learned up to then by examination and analysis of the bomb debris and fragments held nothing which pointed to their having come from any garage, much less any particular one. Steel fragments picked up in the bomb crater had been sent to the Bureau of Standards and the Bureau of Mines. The government experts’ conclusions were that the firing mechanism had been roughly similar to that which creates the spark in an ordinary cigarette lighter, and that this had been attached by a tiny chain (passing through a tube) to the lid of the box. The explosive material, they believed, might have been acetylene. In moistening one of the fragments which had a white deposit on it, they had discerned an acetylene odor. (Acetylene was already long outmoded in 1930 for motor headlights, and pointed no longer particularly to a garage as it might have in the old first days of the Model T.)

The detectives had nothing whatever on Leroy Brady beyond the fact that he had the mechanical ingenuity to have devised the bomb — and was Herman’s brother. So they were again at an impasse.

Dr. Wood, Johns Hopkins’s great experimental physicist, was called in as a police consultant on the suggestion of Governor Ritchie. The suggestion was welcomed by District Attorney Parran and the police. Dr. Wood began to work directly with Lieutenant Itzel and his department.

They handed over to me immediately (says Dr. Wood) the small steel fragments which had been found in the crater under the floor of the Hall house, and which in the meantime had been returned to them by the Bureau of Standards. Then, very sensibly, they drove me down to the scene of the explosion, which I studied thoroughly. Everything pointed to dynamite. There was a hole about eighteen inches in diameter in the kitchen table and directly below it a hole through the floor nearly three feet in diameter. I came to the conclusion that the damage could be best accounted for by about half a stick of dynamite. Acetylene, I knew, could not have done it. Then, back at Johns Hopkins, in my laboratory, I began to examine the steel fragments.

There were four or five small pieces which had evidently formed part of a short length of steel tubing about % of an inch in diameter. They had been smashed flat by the explosion, but there was no question about their having formed a tube. The Bureau of Standards had sawed the original fragment into pieces and had pried one of them open after making a longitudinal cut with a saw. This opened section showed on the inside a number of spiral grooves, together with some small U-shaped pieces of steel wire. Close examination of these small bent fragments of wire, which might have been chain, convinced me of a totally different explanation and gave me my first clue to the real nature of the firing mechanism. I discovered, fitting them together end to end, that they must have originally come, not from a chain at all, but from a single continuous piece of steel wire, coiled inside the tube in the form of a spring. The force of the explosion had flattened the tube and broken the coiled spring into small fragments. I became completely certain of this when I discovered that the spring, pressed against the wall when the tube had been flattened by the explosion, had left a spiral groove around the inside of the tube. Though the spring had been smashed to pieces, it had left its “finger prints”.

In addition, there were a number of short fragments of a steel cylinder, exactly the same diameter as the inside of the steel tubing, and on the end of one of these were the remains of a small disk of copper, firmly welded to it or “soldered to it for some purpose unknown”, as the Bureau of Standards had reported. Prying it off I found a coating of a bright silvery metal on its back which resembled solder but which a magnet showed to be steel. It seemed probable that it was the remainder of a copper percussion cap that had been welded to the steel by the force of the explosion. The position of certain holes which had been drilled through the tube wall and also through one of the cylindrical fragments finally enabled me to reconstruct the firing mechanism which had exploded the dynamite, so I sent for the detectives and phoned the District Attorney’s office. District Attorney Parran, from Upper Marlboro County, and Wilson Ryan, a Washington criminal lawyer, who had been assigned by Governor Ritchie to assist the District Attorney, together with Lieutenant Itzel, all arrived together.

“Well”, they said, “have you found anything?”

“Yes”, I replied, “this is it”.

I took a piece of paper and drew a diagram of a short steel tube containing a spiral spring compressed by the cylinder carrying the percussion cap which was held back by a nail through the two holes in the tube and through the hole in the steel cylinder. At the other end of the tube was another short steel cylinder, also held in place by a nail. A string was tied to the nail, which held the cylinder carrying the percussion cap against the compressed spring; the other end of the string was attached to the lid of the candy box, so that when the box was opened, the nail was withdrawn, the released spring drove the cylinder with its percussion cap against the other cylinder, exploding the detonator that fired the dynamite.

They looked at the diagram in amazement. “Why”, said the District Attorney, “that’s exactly the mechanism of the rabbit gun”.

“What’s a rabbit gun?” I asked.

“A rabbit gun is a small brass twenty-two-caliber rifle attached to a log by a screw. The bait is carried on a wire attached to the trigger, the bait being in front of the muzzle, and when the rabbit takes the bait, the gun is fired and hits the rabbit in the head. But what makes your discovery exciting is this. We have evidence that Leroy Brady was taking one of these guns apart on his bench about two weeks before the murder”.

“Did you ask him why he had been doing that?”

“Yes”, they answered. “Leroy said he was taking it apart to remove the steel trigger and replace it with a brass one, because he was afraid the steel trigger would rust, out in the woods”.

“That’s nonsense”, I said. “Any good mechanic would know that a brass trigger wouldn’t work. The sharp, nicked edge which holds back the cocked hammer would wear away in no time with soft metal like brass”.

I told the police that in my opinion, Leroy had taken the rifle apart to find out how the internal mechanism operated. I asked them to find and bring me the rifle if they could. I said it would probably have a brass trigger on it by now all right, since he wouldn’t be fool enough not to put one on when he had a chance. In the meantime I realized that to make a case, we must find out if possible what the steel tubing had originally been made for and where it had come from. It had evidently been a gas-welded tube of commercial factory manufacture. Remembering, in this case, that the Wall Street bomb fragments had never been successfully traced, I decided to take on this search myself. I began by visiting personally a number of big hardware stores and showing them the fragments. They told me the tubing was not standard gauge and must be of foreign make. This did not satisfy me. I next wrote to the editor of Iron Age, the New York metallurgical journal, asking him to send me the addresses of all companies in the United States which manufactured gas-welded steel tubing. He gave me the addresses of seven or eight companies, and I mailed a fragment of the tubing to the first company listed, asking them to send it to the next on the list, and so on until it could be identified. It became a sort of chain letter. The first three companies to which it went could not identify it. But the fourth, the Republic Steel Corporation, replied, “We recognize this tubing as our manufacture. It is a bastard size and is made to order for General Motors to serve as the torque rod of the steering gear of the Chevrolet”. The torque rod runs down the steering post, from the lever which advances and retards the throttle.

So the tubing in the bomb had definitely come from a Chevrolet garage or storeroom! Dr. Wood was making progress. But there were thousands of Chevrolet garages — hundreds in Maryland and the District of Columbia. It remained to be proven, if possible, that this particular tubing had come from the one garage where Leroy Brady worked. It seemed utterly impossible to do this. But our scientific detective in real life had made an additional microscopic discovery which might point the way.

Wood continues:

I had discovered a tiny, seemingly accidental imperfection, if you could call it that, in the tubing fragments — two parallel scratches, microscopically visible on all the fragments, along the tube’s seam — made probably by a nick on the machine which had polished them. I went to Chevrolet headquarters in Baltimore, first of all, and asked permission to examine the torque rods they had in stock. None of them showed similar scratches along the seams. I then asked Lieutenant Itzel to send someone quietly down to the Chevrolet garage in Washington where Leroy Brady worked, to purchase and bring back a couple of torque rods from the stock there. These were brought to me, and both of them had scratches identical with those on the bomb fragments, showing that they must have come from the same batch of material as the rod used in the construction of the bomb.

The net was closing in. My findings now pointed more and more definitely to Leroy Brady.

I was certain, from the remains of the small copper disk welded by the explosion to the fragment of steel cylinder which had been part of the mechanism, that an old-fashioned percussion cap identical with those used for muzzle-loading shotguns had been used. Furthermore, another fragment of like steel cylinder Lieutenant Itzel had later found showed that a skilled workman had “turned” its end down to exactly the right diameter to fit such a cap.

I felt this might form an additional clue, since muzzle-loading shotguns were extremely rare as late as 1930, even in rural districts. I wasn’t thinking any more about the twenty-two- caliber rabbit rifle which had merely supplied the model for the firing mechanism — but about where the shotgun cap had come from. The cap used in the bomb had been pure copper. I had Itzel buy several boxes of caps, each made by a different arms company, and analyzed the metal. All the types but one were made of brass, copper plated. Only the caps made by Remington were pure copper.

I was now ready to take a chance. I told Lieutenant Itzel to get a search warrant — to search the farm where Herman Brady lived, from attic to cellar, for a muzzle-loading shotgun, or for any evidence that there had been one there, and to look for a box of percussion caps. Three hours later he was back at my laboratory.

“Well, Doc”, he said, “we found the muzzle-loader, and we also found a box of percussion caps on the mantelpiece… and they were Remington!”

I said, “Bring them in, and I think I can promise you the material for an indictment and conviction of one or both of the boys”.

Lieutenant Itzel said, “Oh, we’ve got the shotgun all right, but we didn’t bring the caps along. We left them on the mantel”.

I sent the detectives back. But in the meantime the evidence had disappeared.

When District Attorney Ryan heard the story, he said: “Well, I guess, just the same, we can ask the Grand Jury for an indictment”.

“Not quite yet”, I said. “I want to make a firing mechanism exactly like that of the bomb, with similar tube, springs, steel plugs, percussion cap and everything, and then explode a stick of dynamite against it and see whether we cannot get an exact reproduction of the fragments”.

This was direct scientific experimental method, and the District Attorney had sense enough to approve it.

I asked Lieutenant Itzel to obtain the dynamite and arrange a place where we could go out into the country to try it.

In the meantime I had learned that a spring similar to the one used in the bomb was used in the manufacture of the door-handle mechanism of Chevrolet cars. From a piece of identical spring, therefore, from a piece of tube cut from that bought from the garage in Washington, and from a piece of steel cylinder obtained in our own Johns Hopkins machine shop, I made a model of the mechanism as I conceived it.

Next day I was driven in a police car out into the country, to the place of a man who sold dynamite. Behind the house was a shed in which he kept the dynamite and detonators. We cut off half a stick, attached my model of the firing mechanism to it, dug a hole in the ground, placed the combination at the bottom, covering it over with a large box, lighted a fuse, retreated to a distance, and let it explode. Digging in the earth at the bottom of the hole, we discovered the wreckage of the firing mechanism which I had made. In every way it was identical with the wreckage of the firing mechanism of the original bomb. Everything had been exactly reproduced, including the flattening of the tube, the spiral grooves on the inside, and the U-shaped hooks formed by the fractures of the coils of the spring.

The grand jury returned an indictment of both the brothers. The trial resulted in a hung jury, but at a second trial Leroy was convicted of second-degree murder and was given ten years. A good deal of the technical evidence had been ruled out, and he escaped the death penalty. Herman had been indicted as an accessory, but the case against him was dropped, despite the fact that he had accompanied Leroy when the bomb was delivered and the crime had obviously been committed to get him out of a jam… .

A year later, further confirming Leroy’s guilt, a box was found, concealed in an abandoned flue of the garage in which he’d worked, containing eight sticks of dynamite wrapped in a newspaper dated just a little prior to the murder.

The old adage of the prophet without honor began to be dis- proven in Dr. Wood’s case. Already famous in New York, London, Berlin, Vienna, for his work in pure science, he was now regarded by the police and populace of Maryland as a genius and wizard in the realm of bombs and high explosives (which interested him only incidentally). Soon, consequently, he was begged to aid in the solution of further crimes and mysteries.

From time to time throughout the intervening years, and still today, a stock three-column headline, with variations, announces in the Baltimore and other big southeastern dailies to all and sundry:

DR. WOOD SEEKS CLUE

TO NEW DEATH BOMB

or:

FAMED JOHNS HOPKINS SCIENTIST

CALLED IN TO AID POLICE

or simply:

WOOD INVESTIGATES THE CASE

Under the headline is generally, again with variations, the picture of a gentleman seated in a laboratory, surrounded by microscopes and more mysterious instruments, sometimes gazing at a pile of jagged metal, sometimes looking out the window. The profile is startlingly like that of Sherlock Holmes — and always includes the pipe. The pipe is no pose. He’s given up cigars and never smoked cigarettes. Added to the keen Holmes, classic-actor profile, the pipe is just a piece of luck for the cameramen. These pictures appear also from time to time in New York and other metropolitan dailies when one of the investigations develops a national twist or angle, as was the case a few years ago, after which he was invited by J. Edgar Hoover to lecture before the G-man’s police training school.

This followed another bomb murder, the assassination in 1932 of a well-to-do spinster. She was killed by a bomb attached to the muffler of the Buick car which she always drove herself. The retarded explosion occurred one day after she’d started the car, as usual, in her own garage, and had driven about two miles. It became vital, during the police investigation, to know definitely whether the explosive had, or had not, been dynamite. Their own experts were stumped, and Wood was again called in. With no usual clues to go on, he conceived the bright if startling idea of blowing up some more old Buicks.

“We located an ‘auto cemetery,’” he says, “got a lot of dynamite and other explosives, and spent the afternoon blowing up all the old Buicks we could find, to the delight of crowds of little boys attracted from miles around by the noise”.

Study and analysis of the debris proved with absolute certainty that the explosive in the bomb murder could not have been dynamite, but had been something entirely different — which was what they were after.

This “method”, which nobody had ever thought of before, was outlined by Dr. Wood in his lecture at Edgar Hoover’s school attended by police from all over the country. Soon the California police were using it successfully, and now it is a regular part of bomb-squad technique in dealing with similar cases.

Tragic and grimly fantastic was the mysterious death from an explosion in 1935 of Miss Emily Briscoe, daughter of a prominent Baltimore family — a case whose solution Dr. Wood later presented to the British Royal Society, of which he is a member, in a paper entitled “Optical and Physical Effects of High Explosives”.

One winter Sunday afternoon in the Briscoe home, when the servants were off, the house became a little chilly, and Miss Briscoe went down to the furnace and opened its door to see if the fire was burning properly. The family heard a “bang” like a muffled pistol shot and then Miss Briscoe exclaiming, “Why, something stung me!”

When they rushed down, she was standing before the open door of the furnace, bewildered, clutching at her breast, and repeating:

“It was like a sharp sting. Something must have struck me — here”.

When they opened her dress, there was a tiny red mark, such as might have been made by the point of an ice pick. They were puzzled, were going to put iodine on it and phone the doctor. To their horror and amazement, the girl collapsed, and in less than three minutes was dead. There was no blood — just a tiny red puncture.

An autopsy by the city physician showed that a large artery had been cut, and that internal tissues had been torn to a considerable degree. Yet no projectile, no “bullet”, no fragment of metal could be found. Finally an X-ray examination revealed a minute opaque object lower down in the body. Dissection disclosed a tiny, queer-shaped metal pellet, the size and shape of a grape seed, surrounded by a thin metal skirt. No one had ever seen anything like it before.

It was sent to the city chemist. On the insistence of the influential family of the dead girl, backed up by the demands of the newspapers, Dr. Wood was called into the case. He tells the story.

When I went down to the city laboratory, the chemist was surrounded by a group of reporters, to whom he was exhibiting the mysterious tiny fragment of metal, held in the palm of his hand. As I came in he said to the reporters, “I shall have no statement to make until I have analyzed this metal, and found out what it is. I shall then make my report to the coroner, after which it may be released to the newspapers. Until then I have nothing to say”.

I knew the chemist very well, so I had no hesitation in being a little familiar with him. “It’s obviously copper. There’s nothing to be gained by analyzing it, which will destroy it and then we can’t identify it. Let me have it, and I’ll see if I can find out where it came from”.

“What do you think it is?” asked the chemist.

“I think it is part of a detonator or dynamite cap which got into the furnace by mistake with the coal. It was probably lying on top of the coal, and when the furnace door was opened the flames came up through the unconsumed coal and ignited the detonator”.

The reporters were all ears, of course, and I was captured and taken aside. “How can you find out about that?” they asked.

“Well”, I suggested, “if you have a car here we will go out to a quarry and get some detonators and fire them”.

The fragment of copper removed from the body did not resemble in the slightest degree any portion of the detonator. Here was a pear-shaped pellet of solid copper the size of a small grape seed, surrounded by a thin disk of the metal which hung down from the waist of the pear like a petticoat, while a detonator is a thin-walled tube of copper about the size of a twenty-two cartridge, and from an inch to two inches in length. At the lower end there is a dent in the copper which resembles the dent made in the cap of a shotgun shell after it has been struck by the firing pin. This dent plays a curious role and gives the detonator its deadly quality, as will be seen presently. It is filled with mercury fulminate, a very high explosive, and fired by an electric current through two wires.

We suspended a detonator above a block of hard oak about five inches square and fired it. A small hole was visible in the surface of the wood, and on splitting the block we found a small pellet of copper which had penetrated the oak to a depth of about four inches. The fragment was about the size of the one taken out of the body, but it had been considerably distorted by its passage through the hard wood. I accordingly secured a few more detonators and brought them back to my laboratory where I suspended one about two feet above a large earthenware jar holding about five gallons of water, pointing the head downwards. On firing the detonator the jar was shattered into a dozen or more pieces by the pressure wave exerted in the water by the passage of the small copper fragment (the head of the detonator) entering the water with three times the velocity of a rifle bullet, just as a milk can filled with water is burst open when the bullet of a high-powered rifle is fired through it. The minute fragment of copper which was found in the ruins of the jar matched perfectly the fragment found during the autopsy but bore no resemblance to the original head of the detonator.

As further examination of detonators showed that they contained nothing of the nature of this solid bullet, it was clear that it had been molded by the heat and pressure of the explosion from the paper-thin wall of the copper detonator tube. This discovery, for it really was a discovery, shows the importance of experiment in any investigation. Up to this time the formation of this solid pellet had never been noticed or described. Its formation resulted from the presence of the dent at the bottom of the copper tube, which the explosive experts had found increased the force of the dynamite exploded by the detonator without knowing why. The reason was now quite clear. The copper bullet traverses the entire length of the dynamite stick, with an initial velocity three times that of a rifle bullet. If there were only the thin fragments of sheet copper into which the rest of the detonator is blown the explosion would be started only at one end of the stick.

The problem of how this solid pellet was formed was solved by firing detonators loaded with different amounts of explosives into a long cylindrical pasteboard tube filled with cotton, diaphragmed with thin paper disks every two inches, the pellet being searched for in the cotton lying between the last disk perforated and the next intact disk. As the pellet, which starts off with an initial velocity of about 6,000 feet per second, penetrates the cotton it gathers a tightly wadded ball around it as it advances, spinning its own cocoon, so to speak, and is thus protected from friction against the matter through which it is passing.

Until Dr. Wood made these discoveries, not even the technical experts on dynamite, blasting, and commercial explosives had ever known or dreamed of the terrific velocity this “pellet” expelled from the detonator possessed, much less the weird, sinister shape into which it became transformed.

These detonators, harmless-looking as an ordinary small cartridge, yet as deadly dangerous as rattlesnakes — often picked up by children around quarries — began to interest Dr. Wood. He learned that there are between three hundred and four hundred accidents from detonators per year in the United States, many of them fatal. He continued his experiments and issued warnings, which have already begun to cut down this category of accidents in which children are frequently injured, mutilated, blinded, and have in some cases lost their lives.

Said Dr. Wood: “Children fire them usually by putting them on a rock and striking them with a hammer or another stone. Parents and schoolteachers should warn children that if they ever find anything resembling a twenty-two-rifle cartridge with wires or a fuse protruding from it, they should give it a wide berth and should on no account attempt to explode it”.

Wood’s most far-reaching, though less sensational, contribution to the science of detection is known, curiously enough, throughout the world as the “Vienna Method”, though it was invented in America, by an American, and given first to the American police. It is a device for detecting raised checks, superimposed forgeries, erasures and alterations in manuscripts, by photographing the material with ultraviolet light. Wood published the method about 1906; the alert Vienna police began to read about it, and wrote direct to Wood for further details, which he generously supplied, with additional suggestions. They then began publishing extensive reports in various important technical European police journals, giving Dr. Wood full credit for the invention but claiming its adoption by themselves. In consequence, even here in America, “Vienna Method” became the police-laboratory name for it.

Despite his major absorption in pure science at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Wood is still frequently called on by both the police and private parties to help solve this or that mystery — particularly if it has anything to do with fires or explosions.

Not long ago two lawyers, accompanied by a gentleman whose left hand was missing, knocked at the door of Wood’s laboratory. It was explained that a serious accident had occurred on a turkey hunt. A shotgun had exploded at the breech, tearing off the hunter’s left hand at the wrist so completely that it hung by a few shreds of muscle and skin. The gun was one of the most expensive on the market, guaranteed by one of the most prominent firms dealing in firearms, and the victim was about to bring suit against the company for heavy damages. A chemist who had analyzed a fragment from the barrel was ready to testify that it was made of a low grade of steel and showed evidence of flaws, but the lawyers wanted someone who had specialized in explosions to serve also as expert. They had brought the gun with them, a twelve-gauge shotgun of aristocratic family.

Wood examined it carefully. The explosion had occurred in the barrel at a distance of about three inches from the breech, and at first sight he could not understand how such a serious break at this point could have been caused by a normal cartridge.

After examining the inner surface of what remained of the barrel with a magnifying glass, he laid the gun down and said: “Gentlemen, you’ve assigned me to the wrong side of the case. The explosion was due to the circumstance that somebody had slipped a sixteen-gauge shell into the twelve-gauge gun by mistake. It had slid into the barrel and stuck where the barrel narrowed above the breech. Subsequently a twelve- gauge cartridge had been introduced and fired. The simultaneous explosion of the two cartridges exploded the barrel”. Wood pointed out that bright, brass-yellow stains could be seen at several spots on the inner surface of the barrel, and taking a penknife he succeeded in detaching two small fragments of thin sheet brass, which had been welded to the steel by the force of the explosion. These fragments had exactly the thickness of the sheet brass from which the head of a sixteen- gauge cartridge is made.

There was an uproar. The owner of the gun insisted it was impossible. He had no sixteen-gauge shells in his pocket, did not even own a sixteen-gauge gun. He had fired the gun a few minutes before the accident, had inserted another twelve- gauge immediately, and closed the breech.

Wood said, “I can’t help that. A sixteen-gauge got in somehow. Someone in the gun club may have picked up a shell that had been dropped on the floor and put it in the pocket of your hunting coat that may have been hanging in the vicinity. You slipped it into the gun after firing, and then a few minutes later, not being sure whether you had reloaded or not, opened the breech, and seeing that it was empty (the sixteen-gauge having slipped down out of sight) you inserted the twelve-gauge”.

The owner was aggressively positive about the impossibility of such a fantastic theory. He remembered exactly what he had done, and after a long argument the group departed. Wood noticed that the two small fragments of brass were still on his desk, and he put them carefully in a pillbox and tucked them away in his desk drawer, in case they should be required subsequently.

The lawyers, however, still wanted his testimony in regard to certain other facts connected with the explosion, and pointed out that only such questions would be put to him as could be answered without reference to the yellow metallic stains and fragments of brass. But Wood declined to go on with it. “The other side may employ an expert who will notice the stains, and their counsel will ask me in cross-examination if I didn’t observe them, and I will either have to commit per jury and say ‘No’ or give a truthful answer, and then be faced with the question: ‘Did you point this out to the prosecution?’ ”

They decided to go ahead with the case without Wood, and the trial was slated for a certain date in New York. Some weeks later it was dropped.

Another queer case in which he confounded the conventional experts occurred in Baltimore in 1938. With a set of childish miniature tenpins, he knocked the stuffings out of a lawsuit which had been brought against the Pennsylvania Railroad by some twenty householders who claimed that the rumbling vibration caused by passing freight trains was demolishing their walls, ceilings, and plaster.

Their houses lay along a street in South Baltimore down which a railroad track ran on which several trains passed daily. Heavy trucks also passed along the street, but the suit was brought against the railroad. The claims were so fantastic that the railroad knew they couldn’t be true, yet was in a quandary how to disprove them before a jury. A saloon keeper was going to testify that the bottles fell off his shelves when freight trains went by; another family would testify that windowpanes were shattered and plaster knocked off the walls; and one man actually testified at the trial that his wife had been thrown out of bed one night when a train passed.

The railroad at great expense had brought seismographs and seismograph experts, including one man whose specialty was making records of vibrations caused by quarry blastings. The seismograph recordings proved, of course, that the lawsuit was phony, but were so technical that the railroad realized they wouldn’t be much use for the jury. So, just as the police and federal government had done in many similar criminal cases, the railroad called in Dr. Wood.

Wood scratched his head, said, “Give me a couple of days”, and turned up the second day with a set of tiny wooden tenpins, all of the same size but standing on bases of different diameters, decreasing from 1/4 inch to that of the most sensitive tenpin, which stood on a base only 1/32 of an inch in diameter.

The railroad executives looked at the toys and said, “Are you kidding us?”

Wood set up his toys on a table and said, “Now tap on the table”.

Nothing happened. He said, “Tap a little harder”. The tenpin with the tiniest base promptly fell over.

Wood said, “Now hit the table as hard as you can with your fist”.

The three next smallest tenpins fell over.

Said Wood, “If you kick the table a little or hit it with a hammer they’ll all fall over”. One of the big executives said, “My God, I believe you’ve got it!”

So with the tenpins in their pockets and a long strip of plate glass to serve as a foundation, Wood went down to the district, accompanied by the claim agent and the lawyers. They went from door to door, but no householder would let them in. They’d been warned by their own lawyers.

They finally found an honest old lady who was persuaded to let them in. She even let them go up to the third story where vibration would be at its maximum. Says Wood, with a grin:

I set the plate glass on the window sill, leveling it with a spirit level, and balanced the row of tenpins. Presently a heavy beer truck rolled by, on our side of the street, and the pin with the tiniest base swayed to and fro a bit, threatened to fall, but regained its balance. Presently the big afternoon freight train came puffing and rolling along. The tiniest pin didn’t even tremble. Presently one of the old lady’s grandsons came tearing up the stairs to look at the toys. When he burst into the room to see what was going on, the tenpin with the smallest base upset.

Here was something any jury could not only understand but enjoy, and when the case came to trial and the tenpins were set up in court, not only was it thrown out, but some of the jurors burst out laughing and had to be reprimanded by the smiling judge.

Last summer when he chanced to take me into the littered storeroom of his big laboratory at Johns Hopkins I spied a scarlet-purple feminine dressing gown or wrapper, draped dramatically over a recumbent telescope. I thought he’d put it there as a joke, and asked him whether he kept a harem. Its presence and history, however, were anything but funny. A Baltimore lady wearing an identical wrapper had been burned to death when the wrapper had been ignited, perhaps by a carelessly tossed match. The material went under a trade name and seemed to be a kind of chenille. Fire spreads over it almost in a flash. A lawsuit was pending in which Wood had been asked to investigate the danger of such textiles.