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 Nineteen. Collecting the Medals

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.

I gave an illustrated lecture on some results I’d obtained with some new types of spectra I’d discovered, and the serious part of the visit was over. At the end of the banquet, which was an evening affair attended by professors and wives, an amusing speech was made by von Laue, discoverer of the method of photographing crystal structure by means of X rays. He said a Ph.D. (honoris causa) from Berlin University was a rare honor, requiring the unanimous vote of the entire faculty, and that so far as he knew no physicist had received it before. As some members had never heard of the proposed recipient a copy of his book on How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers had been passed around at the meeting, and this had made the vote unanimous.

I made a halting reply in bad German, in which I tried to tell the story of a Japanese professor who “wished very much to buy very many copies of very funny book to send to very many friends in Japan”, and was able to sit down under cover of laughter. Gertrude didn’t think I’d made a sufficiently grateful acknowledgment, and made a pretty speech of her own, expressing our gratitude and the pleasure we’d experienced in renewing old friendships — all in better German than I had been able to grind out.

During my short talk I happened to mention that I’d brought over a sample of a newly discovered chemical (a derivative of sulpho-urea) that was absolutely without taste to about 40 per cent of humanity, while to the remainder it was as bitter as quinine, and that any who cared to sample it could be accommodated. Later on, when I produced the little pillbox filled with the flourlike white powder, I was surrounded by a crowd of German Herr Professors and their Fraus, holding moistened, outstretched fingers, and all crying:

“Bitte, bitte” (Please, please).

Then came a terrific general argument and uproar.

“No, it tastes not at all!”

“But yes! You have no taste!”

“It is terribly bitter!”

They almost came to blows over it.

In 1935 Wood was elected president of the American Physical Society, and was obliged to attend again the Pacific Coast annual meeting, which was in Pasadena. He chose high explosives as the subject of his presidential address and enlivened it with stories of cases he’d solved for the police.

As he was descending an elevator after the annual dinner, one of the members came up to him and said,

“Dr. Wood, will you forgive me if I ask a rather impertinent question? You seem in a good mood, and I’d like to risk it”.

“Shoot”, said Wood.

“Are you a Christian Scientist?”

“No”, Wood replied. “What put that in your head?”

All he could answer was that he’d heard it somewhere.

It was only later, when Wood told his wife about it, that she remembered Margaret’s attempt, as a little girl, to uphold the family honor. She had confided to her mother one day that the neighbor’s little girl had said, “We are Episcopalians. What are you?”

“And what did you say?” Gertrude asked.

“I said we were Christian Scientists”, Margaret answered. “You see, I knew papa was a scientist, and I supposed we were Christians”.

In the summer of 1936, the Woods went to Mexico, which seemed to them, except for Egypt, the most interesting country they had visited. Wood’s enthusiasm for archaeology came once more to the fore. He was particularly interested in the obsidian razors, made by the Aztecs in Montezuma’s time, and he asked several local archaeologists how they were made, but no one seemed to know. Obsidian is a black volcanic glass, and the razors were thin narrow blades, very sharp along both edges, not over 1/16 of an inch thick and five or six inches long. He worried over this problem, until one day, in poking about over a pile of excavated material at the great pyramid of Cholula, which is so vast that it carries on its summit a large modern church, he picked up an obsidian five-sided “peg”. He recalled one of his old laboratory experiments, and this gave him a clue. The razor might have been made at one fell swoop by a blow of a hammer against one edge of the pentagonal top of the “peg”; in other words it was a long, keen-edged “chip”. Examining the five edges at the top, he found that each one had a roughened spot, where the hammer blow had fallen. He had frequently made “paper-thin” mirrors in the laboratory which had one edge “razor sharp”, by silvering a piece of plate glass, standing it on edge, and hitting the upper edge a sharp lick with a hammer. The thin chips that scaled off were often half an inch square and very light. These he used as reflectors in photometers, or for galvanometer mirrors. He didn’t experiment with his obsidian specimen, as he felt sure that his twentieth-century skill as a manipulator would not come up to that of a half-savage Indian in the pre-Cortez age.

In 1938 Wood took a transcontinental motor trip, from Chicago to Berkeley, California, with Professor and Mrs. F. A. Jenkins and their two boys. He went to Pasadena, and to the Mount Wilson Observatory, where two of his eight-inch diffraction gratings had been installed in the spectrograph of the great 100-inch telescope in place of the glass prisms formerly used. Dr. Dunham had already made some new discoveries with them, the most exciting being that interstellar space is filled with the vapor of ionized titanium, the vapor being of such extreme tenuity, however, that it manifests itself as a black absorption line only in the spectra of the most distant stars, the line being much narrower and blacker than the lines belonging to the star itself.

On the way home he spent a week at Flagstaff, Arizona, visiting Dr. Slipher, the present director of the Lowell Observatory, where they made preliminary experiments with a new type of grating for photographing star spectra without a slit. Back in East Hampton, Gertrude joined Wood in a trip to London and Cambridge, where the British Association was holding its annual meeting. Wood gave a communication on a new combination of two prisms and two diffraction gratings for measuring star velocities, which was favorably commented on by Professor Harlow Shapley, Director of the Harvard Observatory, who was in the audience. He also showed motion pictures of the animated crystals of protocatechuic acid, which he had been studying for the past two years. The man assigned to operate the machine lent for the occasion had plenty of trouble. It would start, stop, run backwards for a second or two, then forwards continuously instead of intermittently, giving an imitation of a shower of rain on the screen. This went on and on, the operator becoming more confused each minute, and two hundred people were waiting patiently in the dark. Finally Wood called out, “Is there a doctor in the house?” And a young man in the back row dashed down the aisle and had the machine running perfectly in ten seconds.

Following the Cambridge meeting the Woods spent a week in Oxford for the meeting of the Faraday Society, then to London during “Crisis week”, with everyone rushing for gas masks and all of the parks swarming with men digging trenches. Wood refused to accept gas masks, as they were sailing for home the following week, and he didn’t think the Germans would start things with gas anyway.

It was this same year in London, 1938, that Wood was finally awarded the great gold Rumford medal by the Royal Society. If I understand correctly, this medal is like the coin in the wedding cake. That is to say, it seems to be the best within the best. To begin with, foreign membership in the Royal Society is the highest scientific honor Great Britain can award a non-Britisher, and after they’ve had that piece of cake, rare members are rarely awarded the Rumford medal too. It’s apparently even more complicated, however, for there’s also an American Rumford medal, which Wood received in 1909. Wood has the cake and the coin too. He is a foreign member of the Royal Society and recipient of the medal. Here was the Wood gambit:

1909: Dr. Wood was awarded the American Rumford medal by the Academy of Arts and Sciences, Boston.

1914: Dr. Wood was recommended for the British Society’s gold Rumford medal by Sir Joseph Larmor, but nothing came of it.

1919: Dr. Wood was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society.

1924: Dr. Wood was recommended again for the Royal Society’s Rumford medal by Merton, and nothing came of it.

1938: Dr. Wood finally got the gold Rumford medal.

The Royal Society and the Rumford medal require a bit of further explaining to the American lay audience. Both go back for centuries. The Society was incorporated in 1662, and is the oldest in the world, with the exception of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. Sir Isaac Newton was elected a fellow in 1672, and wrote to the secretary, “I shall endeavour to show my gratitude by communicating what my poor and solitary endeavours can effect… “. A succession of great names occurs in the Society’s annals through the centuries, and around 1790 or 1800 that of Count Rumford blossoms. He was a celebrated colonial British-American scientist, and he founded the award in double, to be given in America by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in England by the Royal Society. A curious final tangling fact is that Count Rumford himself was the first recipient of his own medal in England!

Wood is no help at all in explaining why it was now given to him. On subjects of this sort he becomes impatient. He has stuck all his medals in an old dresser drawer behind his wife’s shopping lists[12]. Some of them, including the gold ones, are about the size, to exaggerate a little, of the toasted buttercakes you get in Childs. The only thing I ever found worth quoting from his notes concerning the Rumford medals was this[13]:

“You get, in each instance, a silver replica of the gold one, presumably in case you wish to cash in on your winnings in your impoverished old age. The Royal Society gold one weighs 15 1/2 ounces”.

Sir William Bragg’s speech in presenting the medal to Wood is the best summary of his achievement, and I quote, from it:

Professor Robert Williams Wood is awarded the Rumford medal. The study of physical optics owes much to Professor Wood, who has been one of the leading experimenters in this field for the past forty years. There is hardly a branch of the subject which he has not enriched by the touch of his genius.

Before the advent of Bohr’s quantum theory, when our knowledge of the structure of atoms and molecules was very meagre, he had discovered the line and continuous absorption of sodium vapor, the phenomenon of resonance radiation of gases and vapors, and the quenching of this radiation by foreign gases. These discoveries opened up rich fields of research and were of the greatest value to later workers in laying the foundations of the theory of atomic and molecular spectra.

The elucidation of the phenomenon of resonance radiation demanded the utmost experimental skill and resource. Nothing less powerful than an improvised 40 ft. focus spectrograph sufficed for his work on the remarkable resonance spectra of molecules! Even now one cannot but admire the beautiful and ingenious experiments on the independent excitation of the yellow sodium lines.

In addition to his researches on the resonance radiation of metallic and other vapours, Wood investigated their magnetic rotation and dispersion. His work on the magneto-optics of sodium vapor both in the atomic and the molecular state is now classical.

More recent but belonging to the same domain of experiment are the very interesting discoveries of Wood and Ellett on the magneto- optics of resonance radiation.

Wood’s mastery of technique is universally acknowledged. He has introduced many ingenious and striking devices to experimental method. These are too numerous to catalogue here, but I would mention specially his method of the production of atomic hydrogen and his observations of the spontaneous incandescence of substances in atomic hydrogen which led to the invention of the atomic hydrogen welding torch by Langmuir; his very efficient and now widely used method of observing Raman Spectra; his echelette grating which has proved to be the grating par excellence for the investigation of the near and far infra-red; and his pioneer use of light filters in ultra-violet and infra-red photography.

If you ask Wood himself why he got the medal, he is quite likely to tell you it was because he introduced smoking in the hitherto forbidden precincts of the Royal Society’s sacred halls! One day, long ago, tea and cakes were being served in the majestic anteroom, when Wood became absorbed in talk with Sir William Crookes and lit his pipe. A flunkey in knee breeches and braided coat appeared as if by magic and whispered, with a mixture of awe and horror:

“Very sorry, sir, but smoking is not allowed”.

Wood says he was so engrossed with Crookes that he went on smoking. Crookes stared, hastily produced a cigarette, and lighted it. In another minute, others lighted up — and the Royal Society has smoked there ever since.

If this episode were unique in Wood’s biography, it might have slight significance, but many similar smoking anecdotes are told of him, and where there’s smoke there’s always fire. One of the strongest leit motifs through this man’s whole life has been his curious, not always conscious affinity with flame. It illumines his Promethean-scientific side and is always spilling over in his pranks, both Huck Finnish and Mephistophelian. In the light of the fact that he led the revolt against Madame Curie’s objection to smoking at the Solway Conference in Brussels, had a somewhat similar adventure at the Royal Auto Club in London, etc., etc., one has the right to suspect that when he lights his pipe where he shouldn’t, the bad little boy who loves to play with fire and shock his Aunt Sally is still hiding behind the absent-minded great man and grinning.

When asked to lecture before the Philadelphia Forum, he chose “Flame” as his subject, and turned the dignified stage of the Academy into a cross between a Blitzkrieg and Vesuvius. There were sheets of blaze, acetylene torches, showering white-hot globules of molten steel — huge tubes of blue fire that whistled and shrieked before they exploded. Leopold Stokowski sat in a stage box. He had often conducted on the same stage — but this beat the burning of Moscow in the 1812 Overture… .

When the curtain went down, Wood wiped his brow, pulled out his pipe, and was striking a match, when the fireman backstage called, “Hey, you can’t do that!”

When this Promethean prankster, whom I then scarcely knew, took me for the first time to his big laboratory at Johns Hopkins, he turned his back for a couple of minutes, near a basin, then blandly offered me a handful of fire. It burned like an alcohol flame, but it was not much hotter than a cucumber[14]. I’ve a notion that if I hadn’t accepted it, I mightn’t be writing his biography.

I began trying just now to explain the serious connection between Dr. Robert Williams Wood, the Royal Society, and the gold Rumford medal. If I’ve slid into writing about Wood in Flames, it’s doubtless bad structure — but it’s all part of the same picture.

In the summer of 1939 Wood had turned seventy, and you might imagine that he’d sit down and rest for a couple of minutes, or even lie down and take a nap. Instead, the Woods were off for the West Coast again for experiments with the new type of diffraction gratings at the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff and at the Mount Wilson Observatory at Pasadena.

Arriving in Pasadena, Gertrude went to Hollywood, where her sister was living, and Wood went to the Observatory for experimental trials of some new gratings he’d made. One placed over a three-inch Schmidt camera of five inches focus gave a fully exposed spectrum of Arcturus in five seconds. With an exposure of ten minutes he secured a sharp photograph of the spectrum of the Ring Nebula in Lyra, which was “going some” for a camera of only five inches focus. These experiments set a record for short exposure stellar spectra with a slitless spectrograph. The photographic plate was only half an inch square, but the definition of the spectrum lines was so perfect that on an enlargement of nearly thirty diameters, the lines were less than one-third of a millimeter in width.

This was preliminary to the real spectroscopic feat he’d embarked on, which was to make a diffraction grating large enough to cover the great eighteen-inch Schmidt camera, with a focus of thirty-six inches, the instrument with which Dr. F. Zwicky was discovering super novae at a rate that caused astronomers to gasp.

In the summer of 1941, Wood was throwing boomerangs at his biographer in East Hampton, and casually starting again for California, with gratings for the eighteen-inch camera.