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 One. Playing With Fire

There is a family legend that Robert Williams Wood wrote a letter to his grandmother on the day he was born. The letter in question is extant. I have read, handled, and examined it. It is dated Concord, May 2, 1868. Its obsolete paper, faded, rusty ink, et cetera, all prove the authenticity — at least — of its date. It reads:

My very dear, very good

Grandmama Wood,

Mother is not able to write today — and she therefore desires me to announce to you my arrival this morning — which was about two weeks sooner than had been expected by my friends. So that I had the satisfaction of taking them all by surprise. I had not a very long journey, although what seemed to me a rather rough one, of thirty-six hours.

I did not, however, on my arrival find myself at all fatigued, but on the contrary in most excellent health and spirits.

“What strong lungs he has got,” say my friends, “and what bright blue eyes.”

In due course of time I shall call to pay my respects to you in person, should we both live. Mother directs me to send her love to you, and to subscribe myself.

Your affectionate Grandson,

Rob’t Williams Wood, Jr.

To Mrs. Elizabeth Wood,

Augusta, Maine

This is the one and only legend concerning this great, fantastic physicist, among a thousand now world-famous in scientific circles, which he categorically denies. He confesses to Promethean pranks, conflagrations, and explosions in his early childhood, to courting his fiancée vocally across the continent with wax phonograph cylinders mailed in baking-powder cans; confesses to the cat in the spectroscope, the trained seals he persuaded the British government to use in tracking submarines; confesses even to “purloining” the purple-gold sequins from Tutankhamen’s tomb, via the Cairo Museum — but denies that he wrote the above letter.

He said to me last summer, “I have never subjected it to my ultraviolet light tests now in general use on dubious manuscripts, but I am convinced that the signature is not mine. As a matter of fact, from certain internal evidence, I believe that the entire letter constitutes a forgery committed by my father”.[1]

If the letter was not authentic, it was at any rate miraculously prophetic. All his life, he has been arriving “sooner than had been expected.” Concerning some of his greatest scientific achievements, later rediscovered and cashed in on by others, the Scientific American had an article not so long ago entitled “Too Soon is as Bad as Too Late.” His pyrotechnic originality is still continually “taking people by surprise” and he is so hyperkinetic that he never seems to know fatigue. He was seventy in May, 1938, and would normally have been retired as head of the Physics Department at Johns Hopkins University. Instead of his being retired as “Emeritus” he was appointed Research Professor of Physics at the same university, and is going stronger than ever. Last summer, 1940, when I was with the Woods at East Hampton, he had just been awarded the Draper Medal by the National Academy of Science, for work which he has done, since his retirement, in so improving diffraction gratings that they are now replacing prisms in the great star spectrographs of the larger observatories. Current gossip about him in Europe has been that most younger associates who worked with him over there broke down from exhaustion and were obliged to take a rest cure every couple of months while he worked on.

The old adage that the child is father to the man has never had a more astounding confirmation than in the case of Wood. By the age of eight, he had already become a sort of potential triple cross with the characteristics of an infantile Prometheus, a poltergeist, and Crile’s Irish Elk. Put in simpler words, the embryonic scientist was a holy terror. He is to this day. In the midst of my work with him at their East Hampton place last summer, the disturbingly beautiful but even more disturbingly not dumb Marya Mannes, daughter of David Mannes (now Mrs. Richard Blow), who had known the Woods intimately since she was sixteen, said to me, patting one of Wood’s bony, powerful, extraordinary hands affectionately:

“You ought to enjoy this work. It’s right up your alley, isn’t it?”

I said, “What do you mean?”

She said, “Haven’t you generally written about savages, cannibal kings, and wild men?”

I said, “I wouldn’t be the one to write a biography about a tame man. I wouldn’t know how.”

Wood is full of a sort of detached affection and kindliness, but he has no deep respect for and no humility toward anything on earth or in the starry heavens except the laws of nature. He has no fear of man or God, or anything — except perhaps occasionally Mrs. Wood.

It is no mere “legend” but a fact in family history that at the age of eight, Wood gave a lecture on the anatomy of jellyfish, illustrated with magic-lantern slides which he himself had redrawn from the pictures in the scientific treatise by Agassiz. They had given him a magic lantern to play with, with a few colored slides. He had tired of the clowns and angels, and had made his own slides as substitutes. The lecture was given in the dining-room, with some of the neighbors’ children and their mothers present.

Said Gertrude Wood, his tolerant but not always meekly long-suffering wife, as we were discussing this childhood episode, “Thank heaven, that was one lecture I didn’t have to attend.”

A contributing influence to his Gargantuan precosity was the fact that while he was still at the age when children like to play with toys (and was being bored to death in “Mrs. Walker’s Select Day School” for nice little boys and girls of good family, where he stood continually near the bottom of the class), he had been given, to play with, one of the most powerful and dangerous toys that has ever fallen into the hands of any child in the history of the world. It contributed to his subsequent scientific achievements — for it was the immense blower plant and factory of B. F. Sturtevant, at Jamaica Plain, outside of Boston.

When young Robert was about four, the family had moved to Jamaica Plain, then an attractive Boston suburb. He had been born in a quaint old house at Concord, and had been dandled as a baby on Emerson’s knee. The Woods had had culture from earliest Colonial days, and Dr. Wood, Senior, had brought back a considerable fortune from the Hawaiian Islands, where he had pioneered in the cultivation of sugar cane.

Their next door neighbor in Jamaica Plain was Benjamin Franklin Sturtevant, founder of the still existing Sturtevant Blower Works for the manufacture of air blowers for mine shafts and other huge devices for ventilation. The Sturtevants had an only son, Charlie, three or four years older than Rob Wood, and the two little boys immediately became friends. It was this friendship, which grew as both became a little older, that led to Rob’s acquisition of the blower plant as a childhood toy — and the way it happened is a beautiful story of childhood friendship, ending on a note of sadness.

Dr. Wood says:

I looked up to and admired Charlie. He was nearly four years older, as I remember, and I was terribly anxious to be noticed by him. The Sturtevants had a large greenhouse in their back yard, and Charlie had a beautiful aquarium, almost like a swimming-pool, with various fish in it. I must have been seven or eight, and had begun to collect butterflies with a net I’d made of mosquito netting. One day as I passed along a small canal ditch by the roadside, I saw little fish swimming there, waded in, scooped some up, threw away my butterflies, and put the fish in my glass jar and took them home to Charlie for his aquarium. I said, “I don’t suppose you’ll want them, they’re only common minnows.” Charlie examined them and said, “Why, those aren’t minnows! They’re fine game fish. They’re baby pickerel.” I was thrilled and happy, and from that time on Charlie began to show some interest in me. Then Charlie did not appear for a long time, and I was told one morning that he had died. I was stunned for a few days and could not realize that I would never see him again. Now that Charlie was gone, and the factory was completed, Mr. Sturtevant, I think, must have transferred to me some of the affection he had had for his own son, for he frequently called me to the fence between our gardens and talked to me. When I was about ten years old, he took me all through the huge factory one day — the great Corliss engines, the iron foundry with its blast furnaces, the lathe rooms with their enormous belts and flywheels, machine shops, pattern shops, carpenter shops everything. He introduced me to the superintendents of the various shops and told them to let me come there whenever I wanted to and to let me do anything I wanted, so long as I didn’t hurt myself.

So that, at an age when most mechanically inclined kids are playing with toy sets of tools and tiny scroll saws in the family woodshed, Rob began not only with the traditional “buzz saw”, but with mighty power-driven machines, hydraulic rams and engines. That he didn’t kill himself — in fact never even had a serious accident — is a tribute to his own skill — and probably also to the friendly watchfulness of foremen and workmen. He was soon literally doing anything he pleased. The workmen in the iron foundry even taught him how to make sand molds, into which they poured the molten iron for his castings. Rob sometimes made mistakes — seldom dangerous ones. He kept a little diary of his exploits, illustrated with his own drawings but devoid of reading matter: this is still extant. The first drawing is the episode of the dumbbells. It occurred before he had begun to understand the plant’s gigantic possibilities. He had put a block of softwood on a big power lathe and started trying to make a pair of dumbbells. Chunks instead of thin shavings were flying, and he had wrenched his hand when a foreman passed, stared, and said, “What are you doing?”

Rob said, “Making a pair of dumbbells.”

The foreman said, “Well, I see one fine dumbbell already. That’s not a chisel you’re using. It’s a screw driver!”

On another occasion, he took a scolding from a superintendent of the plant, E. N. Foss, who had married into the Sturtevant family and was trying to prove his worth by small economies. (He later became governor of Massachusetts). Rob had decided to make an electrical machine which required a large, circular glass plate. Not knowing how to obtain this, he sawed out a circular disk of a dark heavy wood which he intended to varnish. Several days later his mother received a letter from the new superintendent complaining that Rob had destroyed two square feet of “bay mahogany” worth forty-five cents a square foot. Mr. Sturtevant’s new son-in-law had seen the board from which the circular disk had been cut, made inquiries of the workman, and been told that it was done by the boy Mr. Sturtevant had brought down. Rob was severely scolded by his mother and confined for two hours in the “blue room” (guest room, but used as a jail on occasion).

All this, of course, was trivial child’s play, merely a beginning. But even at the start, access to the tool shop, plus his own ingenious imagination, made him a ringleader of the “gang” outside school. Rob had found a book about Norway, with descriptions and pictures of skis. He had never heard of steaming wood to bend it, but went to the Sturtevant works, cut out a pair of skis with a mechanical saw, and curved the ends with galvanized iron and countersunk screws. Next day, he took them to the snow-clad hill where his friends were coasting on sleds, put them on, stood in a superior manner, slid about fifteen feet, and turned over in a snowdrift.

The crossbow came about because Rob’s parents wouldn’t let him have a gun while two of the boys in his gang had rifles. Rob and the less fortunate ones went hunting with slingshots. He had read somewhere about the steel crossbow, and proceeded to make one, with the help of the shop foreman. Shooting an arrow tipped with a heavy bolt of steel, which he also made, it penetrated oaken targets deeper than any rifle bullet. What impressed the boys most was that it kicked like a shot- gun.

Another discovery that made him a sort of king among the kids was that he had learned to apply the principle of the siphon, with the help of an old book of his father’s and a bent stick of macaroni. There’d been a thaw in January, and a flat space at the bottom of the boys’ coasting hill had turned into a little pond of water. This was bad, because as you coasted down where there was still ice you gathered speed. Then your sled hit the pool and you were drenched with mud and water. Girls on their high runner sleds came down less rapidly and went through fairly well, but no boy, of course, would use a girl’s sled. You simply went on doing belly-whoppers on your own sled, to end soaking wet and covered with mud. Rob appeared with a garden hose and announced that he proposed to dispose of the water. His gang, including older boys who went to the same school, was derisive. There was a rise of more than a foot around the pond, and everybody knew that water wouldn’t run uphill. Rob laid out the hose on the ground, had one of the boys stop up one end with his thumb and poured water into the other end until it was full. Already an embryonic showman, Rob took this end and, instead of laying it on the sidewalk, lifted it up over the high fence which separated the road from the lowland bordering the street. Of course the water came rushing through. It was perhaps Wood’s first public scientific triumph.

Another thing that gave him an ascendancy in the gang was that he had learned all sorts of chemical tricks from the books on his father’s shelves and by his own crude, often daring, experiments. He had a love for fire, which has stayed with him all his life, and took particular delight in explosions and loud bangs. Here again the child was father to the man, for he is a leading authority on high explosives, found the key to the reconstruction of the Wall Street bomb, and has solved a number of bomb mysteries and murders for the police.

He had learned, when he was about fifteen years old, that chlorate of potash and sulphur, both cheap and easy to buy, when mixed together and wrapped in paper and hit with a hammer made a noise louder than any cannon cracker. Not content, he made a larger package, laid it on an old anvil, and hit it with an ax. The explosion nearly broke his arm. This didn’t discourage him. He was all for bigger and better noises. When Fourth of July approached he bought twenty pounds of the stuff and with the help of his cousin Bradley Davis and the boy next door set some posts in the earth and built a pile driver ten feet high with a heavy iron weight which when released from a catch at the top by a long cord fell on the old anvil. The first time they tried it, as he joyfully remembers, complaints came in that “the horses in a stable some doors away nearly stampeded, and the windows in neighboring houses rattled.” What he remembers best is that the concussions tore the leaves off all his mother’s raspberry bushes.

Bradley Davis later escaped Rob’s Mephistophelian influence and is now professor of botany at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor!

The three young devils had eight or ten pounds of the explosive mixture left over at the end of the day. They hid it in the cellar of a new building under construction near the railroad station and went blithely off to Boston to see the fireworks on the Common. Rob had learned that if you don’t hit the stuff with a hammer — or a pile driver — but merely put it in a pile and set it afire, it doesn’t explode but burns with a fierce blue flame. They were going to top off the evening by lighting up the town on their return. Rob didn’t know everything about the stuff's properties yet, and they had the unfortunate idea of utilizing some leftover firecrackers so that the flare would be accompanied by pleasing though small detonations. On their return shortly after midnight, they set the mixture, surrounded by cannon crackers, down in the middle of the street in front of the Congregational Church, lighted the chemicals — and ran.

Says Wood:

Before we’d run half a block one of the cannon crackers went off, and the whole mess exploded with a terrific detonation, followed by loud tinklings of glass from windows of the neighboring houses. The street lamps were extinguished by the concussion, and the whole square suddenly became dark. We ran all the way home and I entered the house as quietly as possible, but mother was awake and called out to me, “Rob, what was that terrible explosion?” I pretended not to hear.

His relations with his father and mother were “friendly,” he says, and he has no recollections of serious clashes. This is remarkable when one considers that Rob’s father was eighty when he was fourteen, and that while all boys of that age are fiends, Rob’s superendowments made him a superfiend.

On Decoration Day, in 1883, there was to be a parade around the Jamaica Plain monument to the veterans of the Civil War. It was the usual granite monument, surmounted by a soldier leaning on his gun. Rob decided that the monument needed decorating, so, with the help of the boy next door, he procured a large, broad-brimmed farmer’s straw hat, with an elastic to go under the chin. They trimmed it with rosettes of red, white, and blue and a bunch of long streamers of the same colors. The problem was to get the hat on the soldier’s head and slip the elastic under his chin to prevent the wind from blowing it off.

They surveyed the monument the afternoon before the parade, and Rob figured out that he could climb half way up but that the last ten or twelve feet were unscalable. He found a wooden pole about fifteen feet long and topped it with two horizontal jaws held together by elastic rubber bands. The lower jaw could be opened by pulling a string.

At 2:00 a. m. on Decoration Day, Rob crept out of his house and woke the boy next door by standing under his window and yanking a long string that had been attached to the sleeper’s big toe. Then Rob climbed the monument, with the hat firmly clamped by the jaws of his pole. He soon got the hat on the soldier’s head, and by careful manipulation adjusted the elastic under his chin. Stealthily the two boys crept home. Next day, they were sure they would be arrested if they dared step out of doors. So they had to miss the fun of watching irate citizens call out the fire department, with its hook and ladder, to remove the “abominable desecration.”

Another typical boy’s prank, with its special Wood touch, was monkeying with the doorbells of a new apartment house that had been built not far from the Roxbury Latin School where Rob was being bored to death. There was something fascinating about the long row of speaking tubes with push buttons beneath in the vestibule. The idea came suddenly to Rob one day that it would be simple to “short-circuit” them.

He found just what he was looking for at home, in the closet where wrapping paper, string, etc., were thriftily kept. It was a long pasteboard mailing tube about three inches in diameter. This he held against the battery of speaking tubes in the apartment-house vestibule, marking circles on it to coincide with the mouthpieces of the tubes. Later he cut these out with a sharp penknife and closed the open ends of the pasteboard tube.

Then, with the aid of his friend who lived in the house, he fitted this gadget over the speaking tubes, by which operation a multiple “party line” was introduced, making general conversation among the tenants possible.

The little devils then pressed all the push buttons, beginning with the top floor to facilitate a safe getaway. The ensuing confusion, resembling a new Tower of Babel, can be imagined.

Says Wood today, looking back to that part of his childhood spent in the Sturtevant plant:

The first really interesting thing I found in the factory was something that gave me a start in the study of electricity. I noticed that on going down a long dark passageway which conveyed a huge belt carrying the power from a flywheel to the blower operating the blast furnace, my hair always stood on end. I thought at first it might be because I was afraid. But I knew I wasn’t afraid and sought some other explanation. I wondered if there was a wind coming from somewhere. I held my hand up toward the whirring belt to see if wind was coming from it. Immediately purple streamers of fire began flying from the ends of my fingers. I was fascinated and excited. I put my hand closer to the belt, and a long spark leaped out to my hand. Like all children, I knew about electric sparks from the cat’s back, from shuffling along a heavy carpet and touching a doorknob — and I had found out how to pick up tiny bits of paper with sealing wax subjected to friction. I had also been reading Arnold’s Elements of Physics. In consequence, I realized at once that in that belt from the great flywheel I had a powerful static electric machine at my disposal. I know now that the belt I began to use might almost be considered the progenitor of the Van de Graaff generator. I made Leyden jars and various others pieces of apparatus which are only practical with a source of electricity of considerable volume.

I never had a serious accident, but once I had a narrow escape — nearly lost my right hand and perhaps part of my arm. No matter how big and powerful machinery becomes, one of the most dangerous things in any shop remains the power-driven buzz saw. I had a heavy board on the buzz saw once, when it suddenly jumped out of my hand, but in the jumping pulled me forward so that my wrist almost went down on the saw. The workmen told me that I had got hold of a piece of “springy” wood. After it passes the saw, it clamps together on the saw, then jumps and pulls you forward.

Wood had by that time begun playing with and experimenting with all the big machinery including the hydraulic presses. He apparently refrained from inflicting on his mother any confidences concerning his experiments and narrow escapes. He played there only after school and Saturdays, since she was meanwhile sending him to Mrs. Walker’s select “fitting school,” and later to that of another unfortunate lady, Miss Weston, a spinster. Rob’s outstanding memory of Mrs. Walker’s was when two of the older boys locked her in the water closet, which opened off the main schoolroom. When she’d been released from durance indeed vile, she pinned it down on two brothers, past masters of mischief, and said before the whole school:

“Malcolm and Isaac, pick up your books and go straight home and never return to this school!”

The boys strapped up their books, but one of them turned on his way out and called back:

“Mrs. Walker, here goes three hundred and fifty dollars straight out through this door.” They were of course back again in two or three days.

Mrs. Walker’s reports of young Robert, in the meantime, were completely discouraging, though not so scandalous. She said he was inattentive, almost dull, and that his mind seemed almost always to be “wandering somewhere else.”

Where else it “wandered,” when it wasn’t absorbed at the Sturtevant plant or in exploding bombshells, Dr. Wood tells in his own words. The account goes back now somewhat in time sequence, but helps fill out the picture.

We had practically no science at school, though they had something they called botany at Mrs. Walker’s when I was about eight or nine years old. I hated it and did very badly in it — as in everything else. It consisted of something they called analyzing flowers. A flower was laid on your desk and you were supposed to find its name by looking it up in the botany book, in which the various parts of every flower, calyx, corolla, stamen, pistil, et cetera, had been classified in tables. You would find the top of a vertical column and then follow it down to the proper horizontal column, where you would find a reference to another page of tables, in which the process was repeated. You would eventually come out with the name of the flower in the end, if you knew how and had made no mistakes. It interested me about as much as crossword puzzles do at the present time. I did become interested at the age of nine or ten, however, playing what I suppose now would be called plant physiology, planting an acorn or a bean, and after it had got well started on its way to the surface, turning it upside down to see what would happen, putting pollen from a pear tree on the pistil of an apple blossom, and other strange experiments in cross fertilization. I learned to cut twigs from the trees in winter, and put them in jars of water in the sunshine and watch the buds swell and the leaves come out; watered plants with red ink to see if the white blossoms would turn pink; planted seeds in a flowerpot, covered with a plate of glass and placed in the sun, and was charmed to note that when I lifted the glass and sniffed, it smelled exactly like Sturtevant’s greenhouse next door. My father gave me a very fine microscope and Carpenter’s large volume on microscopy. This started me on excursions in which specimens were brought home from brooks and pools, in glass jars, to be examined under the microscope. Microscopy was a “science” in those days, the science of anything small. Even today, there is a Royal Microscopical Society in England, of which I am an honorary member. I mounted slides and had a large exchange list with other enthusiasts, having correspondents in practically every state. At one time I was mailing living aquatic specimens in small bottles of water in exchange for mounted preparations.

My father believed in teaching me the value of money by making me “earn” my spending cash from earliest childhood[2].

We had about an acre of ground behind our house at Jamaica Plain which was utilized as a vegetable garden. Finding out that the local butcher sold small sprigs of mint to his customers, for fifteen cents, I had my father arrange with him to get his supply from me. We had a small mint bed in the garden for our own use, but by transplanting and spreading it out I succeeded in producing a most luxuriant bed about ten feet square. Every morning before breakfast I used to run down the hill to the butcher shop by the railroad station with a magnificent bunch of fragrant cuttings, for which he paid me five cents. From this he could easily make fifteen or twenty bunches of the size which he sold for three times the money. The tasks which I most disliked were picking potato bugs from the vines and digging up dandelions in the lawn which surrounded the house. But from these sources I derived most of my income. My earliest expenditures were chiefly for rubber bands to make slingshots, and mineral specimens purchased at the natural history store in Boston, for my collection of minerals. Later on my purchases included chemicals and materials for making fireworks. My father gave me a geological hammer, armed with which I scoured the quarries in the vicinity of Boston for minerals and fossils. These, together with the specimens that I bought from time to time, eventually made quite a sizable collection.

The expedition which caused me the greatest excitement was a trip which I made to Braintree on my bicycle to the world- famous quarry where the giant trilobites, Paradoxides harlani, are found. It’s curious how you remember the scientific names of ace specimens in your collection. I had read somewhere a fantastic story about these trilobites, that they were not found anywhere else in the world, and that some scientific romancer had propounded the theory that they might have been brought to the earth on a meteorite. I secured such a heavy bagful of them that it was only with great difficulty that I could mount to the seat of my high-wheeled bicycle.

One day I ran into a young man who had an amethyst crystal which he said he had found in a quarry. It contained two cavities filled with liquid, clear as water, in each of which a small air bubble moved to and fro when you turned the crystal sideways. I had heard of quartz crystals containing moving bubbles but had never seen one, and this was an amethyst with bubbles! Was there another in the whole world, I wondered. He wanted five dollars for it, and I wanted it more than I had ever wanted anything in my life. I teased and teased my father to let me get it, not in my mother’s hearing, however, but he thought the price was a little high, and he was a little doubtful, I think, about the air bubbles moving around in a liquid in the crystal. The young man lived in Boston, and my father said, “You tell him to bring the crystal out here and let me see it.” So one evening the young man appeared with his crystal. He would not, however, come down in his price, and my father after demurring for some time finally handed out a five-dollar bill and I pocketed the crystal. “Don’t tell your mother how much we paid for it,” he said. I still have the amethyst and the moving bubbles are still there.

During my early boyhood we always spent a part of each summer at Kennebunkport. That was in the days when you drove over from Kennebunk in an old stagecoach, and there were always one or more schooners in process of construction along the river. One summer I invented the game of writing a note and putting it in a glass bottle tied to a long spar or boom, to be towed out to sea by a paper kite when there was an offshore wind. The note requested the finder to return the paper with a statement as to where the bottle had been picked up. (One was actually returned by a native of Nantucket!) When the wind was not directly offshore, I found that by putting the nail to which the kite string was fastened two or three feet aft the forward end of the spar, it would sail straight out to sea, with the kite flying 45° or more on the quarter. It was a thrilling sight in a strong wind to see the spar or log rushing through the water like a torpedo with no visible means of propulsion and with a “bone in its teeth.” I often wondered what the crews of passing ships thought of it when encountering it, the kite string being invisible except at close quarters.

Then came astronomy, one of my father’s friends having lent me a very fine five-inch glass telescope, and I was out every clear night. I took no interest in the constellations or their names. This was like analyzing flowers. But I was fascinated by watching the moons of Jupiter as they circled around the planet, casting their shadows occasionally on the disk, the craters and mountains on the moon, Saturn’s rings, and the nebulae.

About his early formal education — to get back to chronology — his mother, with Harvard as the later goal, had hoped that Robert could enter Roxbury Latin School at the age of twelve, and he evidently wasn’t going to be able to if he remained at Mrs. Walker’s. So she had taken him out and sent him to Miss Weston’s School, in Roxbury. To his mother’s joy, and perhaps surprise, he had managed to “get by” at Miss Weston’s, and entered Roxbury Latin. His entrance was deceptively triumphant. He had appeared with other applicants. The principal of the historic school, the redoubtable William C. Collar, commonly called “Dickie,” stood before the applicants with a sheaf of papers in his hands. Rob feared that he had failed again or that if he squeezed through he would be at the bottom of the list of those admitted. Then Dr. Collar began reading, and read:

“The first boy admitted is Robert Williams Wood.”

Dr. Collar had been intending to read the list of admissions alphabetically, rather than for merit, but in fumbling the papers had got the list reversed.

Rob’s auspicious but deceptive place at Roxbury Latin was soon rectified. He fell at once to the bottom of the class and remained there through the whole first year. During the first few weeks of the following year his place in the class was near the top, but he soon forged his way back to the bottom and was dropped at the end of the second year.

This was discouraging. But Dr. Wood, Senior, and Rob’s mother were bent on Rob’s following family tradition and going to Harvard if possible. So they sent him next to the William Nichols Classical School, in Boston, which specialized in Latin and Greek. Rob had no interest in Latin and Greek, while Mr. Nichols had a deep distaste for science. These mutual distastes were emphasized and took on a slightly personal tinge through the episode of the circular staircase. The staircase at the Nichols School, on Temple Place, was a tight spiral with its bannisters riveted to the walls of a plastered well, like the interior of a lighthouse. All boys like to slide down bannisters, but they couldn’t slide down these because they couldn’t straddle them and they were so close to the wall that you couldn’t sit on them. Young Wood knew something about centrifugal force, and began experimenting with the balustrade. Taking a running start from the top of the steps to gather speed, he slid side saddle onto the rail and found himself coasting with increasing velocity around and around clear down to the bottom, where he landed with a bang. The other boys marveled and tried in vain to imitate the performance, but Wood would not allow them to witness the start. It was too wonderful. Centrifugal force pressed your back against the wall, giving you a firm seat, and away you went. Wood says that he has kept his eye open for a similar slide ever since, as he would like to repeat the performance.

Finally he initiated the others, with the result that in a day or two a torrent of laughing and screaming small boys poured off the last turn of the spiral landing on top of Mr. Nichols, who was just entering the street door.

Rob was given a letter to his father. Next morning he was called up before the whole school and asked what his father had said to the letter. Rob gleefully announced that he said he was glad it was nothing worse.

His progress in his own growing scientific-imagination- fostered fantasies began to reach new heights.

As one result, he concocted two elaborate hoaxes. One had no wide repercussions, but the other made a national sensation. During a summer visit to his uncle, Charles W. Davis, in Chicago, he and young Bradley Davis went fossil hunting together. There was a limestone quarry which they visited frequently, rich in Silurian fossil shells and crinoids. Once, while alone, Rob chanced on two large broken slabs of concrete, smooth on the surface, covered with rubble on the back. With a hammer and chisel, he carved on the surface of one the head of a pterodactyl, and absurdly on the other, the outline of a gigantic bug, a sort of imaginary prehistoric devil’s darning needle. Then Rob and some fellow-conspirators “planted” these in the quarry and on the next fossil-hunting expedition he ingeniously steered his young cousin Bradley to the buried treasure.

“His excitement,” said Wood, “at this rich double find was as great as that of the man who discovered gold on Sutter’s ranch in California”.

Rob photographed the “fossils” with a homemade camera and still has the faded blueprint.

The second hoax stirred up national excitement and for a short time almost rivaled the comedy of the bogus Cardiff giant. It was pure hoax, pure fantasy. One of his father’s friends had lent him a big telescope, and he had begun looking for life on Mars and other planets. He didn’t find any, but on July 23, 1887, the following amazing article, which he had concocted out of his own untrammeled imagination, appeared in the Chicago Tribune.

A STELLAR VISITANT

AN INCANDESCENT VISITOR FROM SPACE — MARKED WITH GRAVEN CHARACTERS

Clayton, Ga., July 21. — (Special) — A phenomenon unparalleled in the annals of astronomical science occurred here one day last week, which, from the light it throws upon the hitherto open question of the habitability of the other planets, will prove of great value to science. At 7:45 o’clock p.m. there fell near this town a spherical metal ball or aerolite on the surface of which appear graven characters which give conclusive evidence of its having been molded by intelligent hands. Dr. Seyers, in whose possession the wonder now is, said this evening: “I was returning from a patient’s house, situated some seven miles from the town, where I had spent the latter part of the afternoon. It was about 7: 45 o’clock, though still light enough to read by. I was ascending a long hill, over which it is necessary to drive before reaching home, when my horse suddenly pricked up his ears, and, on glancing ahead, my eyes were dazzled by a brilliant white flash, resembling a lightning stroke, and immediately following came a sharp hiss as of escaping steam. I knew that an aerolite had fallen, for had the flash been electrical there would have been a clap of thunder. Driving on up the hill I noticed that steam was issuing from the ground some few rods back from the road, and on hastening to the spot found a hole about four inches in diameter, from which arose considerable heated vapor. I drove home as rapidly as possible, and taking a pick and shovel returned to the spot. After half an hour’s hard digging I came upon the object of my search at a depth of about five feet. It was still too hot to handle, but I succeeded in getting it to my carriage by lifting it on the shovel. I noticed that it was remarkably heavy, but not until I reached my barn, and removed the adhering soil, did I realize what a prize I had. Instead of a rough mass of meteoric iron, there appeared a smooth, perfect sphere of steel-blue metal, with polished surface and engraved with pictures and writings. I could scarcely believe my eyes, but there was no mistaking facts. There upon the surface of the strange ball was a deeply-graven circle within which was a four-pointed star, a representation of a bird-reptile resembling in a measure our extinct archaeopteryx, and a great number of smaller figures, resembling those used in modem shorthand. The metal of which the ball was composed was unlike anything I had ever seen, being about as hard as copper and entirely infusible in my Bunsen blow-pipe. I filed off some small bits and sent them to a chemist, who made the following report:

“Sir: I have made a spectroscopic analysis of the filings you sent. The metal is fusible only in the electric arc. It is a new element. Examined by the spectroscope, its vapor gives three fine yellow lines to the left of the D. line of Sodium, a broad green one to the right of the line of Barium, and an innumerable number of fine purple ones.

H. Randolph Stevens,

Analytical Chemist!"

Whence came this strange messenger? By what infernal power was it hurled into space? Possibly by some monster gun on Mars or Venus. Possibly launched toward us by some lunarian gunner. Many there are who will say that the whole thing is a hoax and a fable, and that the ball was manufactured on this earth, but the fact that it is made of a metal not found upon this sphere proves beyond a doubt that it is an alien. Hurled with frightful velocity, it traversed the vast distance of space separating us from our nearest neighbor, and, plunging through our atmosphere, became heated to incandescence, and thus losing some of its fearful speed buried itself in the soil of our planet without suffering any injury. How shall we determine whence it came? Is it possible to reply, and can a sort of communication be established between planets? A gun 130 feet long and strong enough to hold a charge of thirty pounds of dynamite would hurl a platinum bullet of two inches in diameter with a velocity sufficient to cause it to pass beyond terrestrial attraction. The dream of Jules Verne has in a measure become realized, and we are, without doubt, standing a bombardment from space.

The ball is now in the possession of Dr. Seyers, but will be sent to the Smithsonian Institution in a short time, when an official report will be made.

Despite all this brilliant extracurricular activity, the boy continued a dullard in the classrooms of William Nichols’s Classical School in Boston! In this day of advanced specialization in education, the stupidity of his preceptors seems more shocking than it actually was then. A boy like Wood would be encouraged today to go into his natural field by all intelligent prep- school professors who knew him. But the “classic” tradition was still completely hidebound in New England, with the result that as he approached eighteen, and the Harvard entrance examinations, he faced almost certain failure. Here, for the first time, he began to take the direction of his studies into his own hands in spite of the violent opposition of Headmaster Nichols. The boy’s only real interest and bent were towards science. It might be said in extenuation of Mr. Nichols’s prejudices that they were almost universal in the Boston of that day. M. I. T. was a long generation in the future for the likes of Robert Wood. A gentleman’s son was supposed to stick to the classics. Against the opposition and definite orders of the headmaster, Wood bought secondhand books on physics and botany, not because the latter interested him much, but because it could help him pass the Harvard examinations. When the smoke blew away after the entrance examinations in the spring of 1887, he found himself admitted to the freshman class, though he had failed ignominiously in Latin and Greek — purely and simply because he had crammed himself brilliantly with science. Up to then he had treated chemistry, physics, astronomy, and biology as amusements and play, rather than work — but he had built a magnificent practical foundation.

To what extent the “gigantic toy” (the Sturtevant Blower Plant) entered into that foundation is shown by the fact that after he entered Harvard, he streaked back to the Sturtevant plant one day, and with the aid of its mighty machinery, succeeded in exploding the “water-lubricated” glacier theory which the great geologist, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, was teaching at the time. Shaler was brilliant, popular, and internationally famous in his field, but young Wood, who took nothing on faith, had many run-ins with him. One of their arguments culminated in a conviction on Wood’s part that Shaler was entirely wrong in his pet theory that the mysterious absence of glacial erosion in wide areas of North America was due to the fact that certain glaciers had been of such terrific weight that the pressure had melted the ice at their bottom and given them a sort of liquid cushion to slide on. This was known as the “pressure-molten water glacial theory.” Shaler insisted that in the non-eroded regions the ice in contact with the ground had been liquefied by the pressure above it, in consequence of which there was an absence of any force to drag the pebbles and boulders along the surface of the underlying rock ledges.

Wood totally disbelieved this. He thought he saw a means of disproving it. Harvard, of course, had no apparatus sufficiently powerful for the experiment he wanted to conduct, so he went back to his old friend Sturtevant and to the blower plant. Sturtevant was greatly amused and interested. He gave Wood carte blanche to try anything he pleased.

A large block of cast iron was prepared and bored with an accurately cylindrical hole about two inches in diameter and eight inches in depth. A steel cylinder was accurately turned on a lathe and exactly fitted in the hole in the block to serve as a piston for applying pressure to the ice. The hole was half filled with water, placed outdoors in the freezing weather, and frozen solid. A lead bullet was then placed on the surface of the ice at the center of the hole and the hole was nearly filled with additional water, which was allowed to freeze. The steel cylinder was then inserted and pushed down against the ice, after which it was subjected to a pressure of many tons to the inch, under the mighty ram of the hydraulic press. It was much greater than the greatest pressure that Shaler had imagined in the case of the glacier, equaling the pressure of a body of ice two miles thick.

Under this enormous pressure, paper-thin sheets of ice were squeezed out around the piston, and in some cases needlelike jets of ice spurted up from the surface of the block, the ice having forced its way through imperfections in the casting. This escape did not, however, release the pressure, the continued application of which was indicated by the gauge on the press.

On removing the block from the press and warming it up to the point at which the ice cylinder began to melt, it was possible to remove the steel piston and shake out the frozen cylinder of ice. The bullet was found at the center where it had originally been placed, thus clearly demonstrating that the ice within the cylinder had at no moment existed as “pressure- molten water”

Wood, though an undergraduate student at Harvard, published these results in the American Journal of Science after communicating them to Shaler. Shaler was crestfallen, yet proud of Wood, and completely convinced by the results of the experiment.

The little boy, now grown to daring youth, had returned for a last time to his gigantic toy and had used it to make his first important contribution to scientific knowledge.