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 Twenty. Boomerang Thrower

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.

While I was a student at the University of Berlin, back in 1896, I chanced to be thumbing a bound volume of the Annalen der Physik, published some twenty years previously. By accident I ran across an article on the flight of the boomerang. It was largely a mathematical treatment by some long-dead Herr Doktor who had probably never thrown a boomerang in his life — and maybe had never seen a real one. It was filled with aerodynamical equations that I didn’t understand. But there were diagrams of the different paths of flight the boomerang could take, circles, figure eights, etc., that fascinated me. There was a footnote stating that “boomerangs were obtainable” at a certain toyshop in Berlin, at a cost of one mark fifty each. I hunted up the address and found that after all those years the shop was still operating. But the young salesman had never heard of boomerangs. I insisted, and finally an old patriarch was summoned who shook his head solemnly, scratched it, and then said slowly, “Ja, ja, warten Sie einen Augenblick. Na — ich erinnere mich” (Yes, yes, wait a minute. Now I remember).

Calling for a stepladder, he climbed to a shelf about ten feet from the floor, tossed a lot of stuff aside, dug out a large parcel wrapped in brown paper, which shed clouds of dust as it came down, and disclosed half a dozen small wooden boomerangs, toys really, of rather light weight. I bought them all, such as they were, hurried home, and repaired immediately to a large open lot behind our apartment in Charlottenburg.

After false starts with all sorts of wrong holds and deliveries, I finally began to make them come back a little, and eventually learned to throw them. I brought some of the boomerangs back to America, and one of the duties imposed on me as instructor of physics at the University of Wisconsin was to give every autumn a boomerang demonstration to the undergraduate class in physics which numbered some three hundred. It was their favorite “lecture” of the year, and always attracted large crowds of gapers from other departments and from the town.

A few years later while on a lecturing visit to England, I became acquainted with Professor Walker, the mathematical physicist at Cambridge, and it turned out to my joy that he too was a boomerang enthusiast. From him I learned to make and throw real boomerangs, made of ash, quite heavy, and with which orbits of much greater diameter could be obtained. These were real weapons, similar to those used in Borneo and the Malay Peninsula. Careful shaping of the surfaces was necessary, giving to the implement, in a slight degree, the properties of a screw propeller. In this way the rapid rotational energy was utilized in supporting the implement when in horizontal flight. I was introduced also to the “war boomerang”, a still heavier implement with the arms bent only at a small angle. This was not intended to return, but flew along a few feet above the ground for a much greater distance than it was possible to throw a war club or spear. It is my guess that the “returning boomerang” is perhaps used by primitives only for hunting aquatic birds in flight. If thrown through a thick flock, flying above the water close to shore, it would return to the shore if it missed. It would need to be retrieved, together with the bird, only when a hit was made.

Any heavy boomerang in flight (continued Wood), especially the “returning” ones, can be dangerous. Some time after I’d known him in England, Professor Walker was giving an exhibition with his boomerangs, in Washington, D. C., before a group of scientists. Distracted for a moment by the crowd of bystanders while one of his returning weapons was in flight, he was struck just below the kneecap and was in the hospital for several weeks. My Berlin boomerangs had been toys. In America I ordered from a bent-furniture factory a dozen boomerang “blanks”, made under my instructions by bending an ash plank three inches thick through a right angle and sawing it lengthwise into sections. These I shaped with a drawknife at East Hampton, and gradually learned to duplicate the performances of my British colleague.

Dr. Wood stopped talking, as if he’d given me that whole story, but according to some things I’d heard in Baltimore, he hadn’t told me the half of it. His hobby had started a small boomerang cult in Baltimore and added to the interest in Washington, where one or two statesmen had already attained high skill in throwing them. President Theodore Roosevelt, summer neighbor of the Woods out on Long Island, wrote, “I wish I could trespass on your kindness by getting you to bring over that collection of boomerangs. ..”. I learned in addition that Wood had been “false modest” in that phrase about “learning to duplicate”. According to Baltimoreans, he had learned to do things with a boomerang that neither Professor Walker from Cambridge University nor the wildest man from Borneo would have cared to risk. As, for instance, here’s one I’d heard, and taxed him with. The Johns Hopkins football team, as I’d heard it, never seriously pretended it could beat teams from universities of its own rank, but kept on having games in Baltimore, though attendance had dropped, since the home team nearly always got licked. So the athletic department thought up the bright idea of inviting Professor Wood to give a boomerang exhibition as an additional attraction with the next game. Wood accepted with a childish and innocent smile. There was a huge attendance, air conditions were perfect for miraculous stunts with the boomerang, and the exhibition was superb. The crowd applauded and was filled with joy… until (as I’d been told by Henry Mencken) our wild man of Baltimore stalked straight toward the low, uncovered grandstand, took his finest stance, and let fly a big boomerang (Mencken said war boomerang) point-blank at his audience. It rose and soared, as he had planned. He was so diabolically sure and expert that he intended it barely to skim over the heads of the topmost row and return to his feet. But an excited man in the top row stood up, with an umbrella. The boomerang took the umbrella as the wild man of Borneo takes the waterfowl, while women shrieked and students applauded, imagining that the whole thing, umbrella, stooge, and all, had been part of a cooked-up, William Tell apple act, by their favorite master of sensationalism both inside and outside the laboratory.

Dr. Wood heard me with pained indignation. He denied that it was a war boomerang — it couldn’t have been — and said it was absurd to imply that anybody had been in danger or terrorized. “You seem to take a sadistic delight”, he said, “in any apocryphal version of my conduct that makes me out a monster”.

“But you don’t deny, do you”, I asked, “that you threw a boomerang into the grandstand and that it hit an umbrella?” “No, of course not”, he answered impatiently, “but…” We were still barking at each other when we went in to dinner, and as Mrs. Wood was carving the roast he suddenly said, “How old were you when you began to remember?”

“Maybe between two and a half and three”, I said. “What of it? Isn’t that about the time most psychologists agree…

“No, you’re wrong”, he said. “If they agree, they’re wrong. I’m convinced it can and does sometimes go further back. I’ve done some experimenting with it, and…

We were interrupted by the not always long-suffering lady who had been engaged up to then in more polite conversation with the second generation at the other end of the table.

“Now please, Rob”, said she, “don’t repeat that old story about fuzzy-wuzzy. If you must tell him about it, tell him some other time. The family’s all heard it a thousand times”. “But, my dear”, said he, in a mild, mock-henpecked voice, “I wasn’t going to tell him that at all. We were talking about boomerangs”.

He subsided into the imitation of a hurt silence, and I said to Mrs. Wood, “Please, what on earth was fuzzy-wuzzy?” “We got sick of it”, she said, “and so did the baby. When our granddaughter Elizabeth was about a year and a half old, he began exploding gunpowder, cannon powder, in the hearth of the living room, with the baby in his lap, saying fuzzy-wuzzy to the baby… “.

“It didn’t explode”, said Dr. Wood. “Nobody ever tells anything right but me. It merely went off with a beautiful bright flame. But I wasn’t going to tell you about that. I was going to tell you about the experiments I tried on our daughter Margaret when she was a baby — with the boomerang”.

“Pray do”, I said. “I beg you to tell me about both. John Watson experimented on his babies with brass gongs, snakes, and rabbits, but I’ve never heard of anybody using gunpowder and boomerangs”.

“It was when I first began throwing them in Berlin”, he said, “when Margaret was about two years old. It occurred to me that the boomerang in flight might be an ideal phenomenon with which to test a theory I had conceived concerning earliest childhood memories. My theory was that the authentically ‘remembered events’ were those which had been kept alive by subsequent associative words, remarks, or events which tied in with the original event without reconstructing, describing, or duplicating it. It was important to select the ‘event to be remembered’ in such a way that the baby could be reminded of it in words that would not in any way reveal the event’s core or essence — otherwise the doubt would always arise that all she really remembered was being told about it later. Moreover, it must be an event not likely to be duplicated later, as there’d be no way of proving that the child really remembered any further back than the later duplication.

“For these reasons, the phenomenon of the boomerang in flight, whose essence was its return to the thrower, seemed ideal for the experiment. I took Margaret out to the back lot for a whole afternoon and threw my boomerangs. She watched their flight, saw them circling back to my feet, and toddled to help me retrieve the few which occasionally failed to return. I kept her near, and on several occasions it was necessary to snatch her from the path of the returning weapon. I never showed them to her again, but for the next month or more I kept asking her every day or two, ‘Do you remember papa’s throwing something?’

“For a while, if she said anything in reply, it was merely ‘yes,’ which proved nothing. But on one memorable day she added, 'Come back.'

“Then for a year or more, until she was perhaps three, I repeated the question at longer and longer intervals. As a mature woman now, she clearly remembers the actual boomerang flights that day in Berlin, and of seeing the thing circle around in the air, as her first actual childhood memory of anything… though her mother is still in the habit of saying, ‘No, you only remember your father’s telling about it.’ ”

“I still don’t believe it”, said Mrs. Wood cheerfully, “and I don’t suppose there’s any use now in trying to stop you from telling what you did to Elizabeth”.

Dr. Wood beamed, taking this for an invitation, and said to me, “You saw the enormous fireplace in the living-room there, with the old Dutch oven at the back. Well, when my granddaughter was about a year and a half, I stood a small bronze dog in front of this black cave and placed on its head a button of German cannon powder, of which I’d brought home a bagful from the war. It looks like a heavy button, you know, a thick black disk with a hole in the middle. With the baby in my lap I touched a match to it. It flared up with a vicious, bright-yellow flame, which burned for about five seconds.

“ ‘That’s the fuzzy-wuzzy,’ I said to the baby.

“I repeated this experiment every day for a week, always saying ‘fuzzy-wuzzy’ when the powder burned. Then I said ‘fuzzy-wuzzy’ or ‘Do you remember fuzzy-wuzzy?’ to the baby every day for a month or so until her mother took her away. I hopefully expected that her mother would say ‘fuzzy-wuzzy’ to her in the intervals of their absence. The reactions of baby Elizabeth, however, were different from those of Margaret who had always politely lisped ‘yes’ to my question. At every family reunion, the baby was as bored as these uncooperative adults of my family, and whenever I said, ‘Do you remember fuzzy-wuzzy?’ she always answered, ‘No!’ Sometimes she laughed slyly. So we hadn’t the remotest idea whether she remembered anything or not.

“The revelation came when she was nearly five years old.

I hadn’t uttered the hated words for a long time when one day at lunch she looked at me and whispered, ‘Fuzzy-wuzzy.’ “I said, ‘What?’

“This time she repeated, louder, ‘Fuzzy-wuzzy!’

“I turned to her mother and said, ‘What’s she talking about?’

“Her mother said, ‘I don’t know.’

“The little witch hesitated for a moment and then said in disgusted triumph, ‘You do know too! You put the dog in the fireplace and put fire on its head.’”

Little Elizabeth was evidently a chip off the old block, and wasn’t taking grandpa’s experiments lying down. The one they tell of her which I like best concerns the memory experiment with the hayride. While she was a tiny tot, she and a playmate named Nancy were taken for a ride on top of a load of hay. Then Dr. Wood began with his “do-you-remember’s”. She refused to be the guinea pig. She never answered anything but “no” or nothing, and it was he who gave up. When the haymaking began across the road on the following year, her mother asked her point-blank one day, “Do you remember riding on the haycart last summer?”

She glanced reproachfully at her grandfather, gave her mother a look of betrayed and outraged indignation, and replied,

“No! And I don’t remember Nancy either!”

I agree with Mrs. Wood and the relatively conservative members of the family that it’s difficult to prove anything with the boomerang story, since Margaret herself can be mistaken — can have later overheard or seen something which described or duplicated the original event. But I think the hayride story proves a lot of amusing things that didactic child psychologists are prone to ignore or soft-pedal.

As for Dr. Wood’s basic theory, which he continues to defend — well, maybe you’ve got something, Professor, even though you’ve stepped out of your own field into Watson’s.

Dr. Wood believes he’s found a vindication of his theory that memory of events can be “fixed” by associative events even in the case of infants too young to be reminded of them in words. In his recent autobiographical As I Remember Him, the late Hans Zinsser wrote:

The minds of little children are like rolls of cinema film on which long series of uncoordinated impressions gathered by the senses are caught. Usually most of these fade in later years. It is only here and there, in the earlier years, that an experience impresses itself with sufficient coloring to remain as a memory for life. My earliest reminiscence goes back to when I must have been between one and two years old. It was like a vaguely remembered dream, until I found later in speaking of it that it was based on fact. I remembered clouds in a blue sky against which the spars of a ship were swinging to and fro, and at the same time I heard a little tune sung with German words. Later I learned that I was taken abroad as a baby and that my father often sat on the deck of the old Moselle and sang me to sleep in his lap with the little song. As a boy I would often — especially before going to sleep at night — hear him singing again, see the swinging spars against clouds scudding across the blue sky[15].

Dr. Wood believes the memory of the sky and moving spars had been repeatedly called up by the frequent repetition of the song through later years, and that it was this accidental associative prodding of the auditory memory that had fixed the visual impression. He proposes an experiment in associative memory fixation which he hopes some enterprising parents interested in child psychology will try out on babies too young to know the use of words. It involves the three senses of sight, smell, and hearing. He would like to have it tried on babies not more than one year old, and believes that “earliest memory” could probably be pushed back to an astonishing degree. As is well known, odors and tunes are powerful stimulants in suddenly recalling events or situations long passed.

A spectacular arrangement of colored lights on a wheel revolving against a black background or in a dark room, or some such device, would be suddenly exposed to the view of the baby, and at the same time a simple but distinctive tune would be ground out on a toy music box, while the air would simultaneously be perfumed by a spray from an atomizer, preferably an odor unlikely to be encountered again.

Then at frequent intervals the baby would be subjected to the combination of two “reminders”, the tune of the music box and the spray of the atomizer, which would recall and fix, as Wood believes, the more entertaining event of the gorgeous revolving wheel of bright colors.

“A much simpler way of trying the same thing”, he added, “would be to sing a little tune and let the baby smell a perfumed handkerchief, while the wheel turned”.

I said, “Why don’t you try it yourself — with the revolving wheel? You love tinkering and gadgets”.

He promptly replied, “Get me the babies, and I will”.