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 Two. Four Intransigeant Years

From the autumn of 1887 until his graduation from Harvard in 1891, young Robert was a difficult problem to most of the faculty with whom he came in contact and conflict. In some studies he was disturbingly brilliant and original; in others he was so indifferent that he narrowly escaped flunking them. It would have been the same in any university. When I asked him how he’d happened to choose Harvard, he said, “Father chose!”

He had entered with the maximum number of conditions. He removed them by taking one or two extra courses each year, but remained a poor student to the end from the viewpoint of those among the academic pundits who discouraged originality — and these were still in the strong majority. By that time, however, Harvard, in response to President Eliot’s advocacy of the elective system, had got away from the hard and fast curriculum which forced every student to take a set variety of subjects, mostly classical. Wood was allowed a considerable choice of subjects. These were largely scientific. He specialized in chemistry and would probably have continued in it throughout his life, with his poltergeist-Promethean penchant for fires and explosions… if the water closet in a certain later — and supposedly select — boarding-house in Leipzig hadn’t opened directly on the dining-room….

While chemistry was his serious concern at Harvard, his hobby was geology, and the great Professor Shaler said one day to his father, “It’s spoiling a good geologist to make a poor chemist.” Despite the glacier episode and other wrangles, Shaler remained his best friend on the faculty. Wood admired him deeply, and my guess is that Shaler had a profound influence in shaping the character — and some of the idiosyncrasies — of the future professor of physics. Shaler was a classroom P. T. Barnum, who delighted in dragging in the cherry-colored cats and elephants. As Wood vividly remembers him, he was a red-bearded, long-legged Kentuckian, noted for what the students called “the geological stride,” which kept classes at a dogtrot as they followed him on expeditions to the rock-bound coast of Massachusetts or to various inland quarries which they visited. Shaler gave the most popular course in college, designated NH-4 in the catalogue. Its popularity lay partly in the legend that it was a “snap,” but there was also an aura about his lecture room which delighted the more intelligent of the students. He was spectacular on occasion to a degree seldom equaled on any stage in the heyday of high vaudeville, and often given to forensic hyperbole. One of Shaler’s fantastic flights so intrigued young Wood that after close to fifty years he can still quote it verbatim. It has never appeared in print, and he begged me to include it.

The geologist had been lecturing one day on the gradual development of life on earth; nature’s provision of terrifying fertility to insure a species against extinction; the necessity of avoiding overcrowding by the introduction of mass massacre of certain lower forms of life, to supplement nature’s own massacres in which species higher up in the evolutionary scale devoured the surplus. Said he by way of peroration:

“The female aphis or common plant louse, gentlemen, produces in a single summer three thousand eggs — gentlemen! — and I have made a calculation that if all the progeny had lived since the first appearance of the Aphididae on earth, we should now have a cylinder of plant lice equaling in diameter that of the earth’s orbit around the sun, and projecting itself into space with a velocity greater than that of light!”

Though our young student was lost in admiration for Shaler’s style and vigor, he frequently precipitated violent arguments concerning Shaler’s theories and facts. Shaler had a fantastic notion all his own that the earth, long ages ago, had itself spawned the meteors and meteorites which now from time to time come crashing back to us. The astronomical theory, of course, is that they are broken fragments of comets, moving in orbits like asteroids, and that when in the course of their wandering they get entangled with the earth’s gravitation, they plunge into our atmosphere, become red hot, and fall to earth in the Siberian forest or in Old Man Jones’s cow pasture.

In a lecture one day, Shaler said, “I feel sure it is more reasonable to regard meteorites as volcanic bombs, ejected from great craters erupting here on earth when the earth was younger and more vigorous. These masses of lava were ejected at such velocity that while they were unable to escape completely from the earth’s attraction, they were projected in orbits of enormous eccentricity, and instead of falling back immediately, return to our planet only after the lapse of millions of years….”

Young Wood, only a sophomore and a surpassingly intransigeant one at that, had been an “astronomer” since the age of ten. He drew Shaler’s attention, after the lecture, to the fact that a velocity of over seven miles a second would be necessary, or fifteen times the velocity of a rifle shell.

Shaler was tolerant, as truly great men are, even in their intolerance, and he and Wood had a long argument about it, but the young student, of course, was unable to shake his conviction in the least. Not even the old Sturtevant plant with its giant machinery could yield any convincing experiment on that.

Professor Jackson of the Chemistry Department was a horse of another color than Shaler. He was one of those “horses of instruction” whom William Blake had in mind when he wrote that the tigers of wrath were wiser. He discouraged original experiment by undergraduates and particularly frowned on impromptu research work in the laboratory.

Wood had read about the compound of iodine and nitrogen which is formed by pouring ammonia upon iodine crystals and allowing them to dry on blotting paper. This compound is a very dangerous explosive, quite harmless when wet, but detonating with a loud explosion upon the touch of a feather when dry. Even a fly lighting upon the powder may cause its detonation. The method of preparing it was so simple that he couldn’t resist the temptation to try it in the laboratory, where he was supposed to busy himself only with qualitative analysis.

Iodine crystals were on the supply shelf and ammonia was on every student’s desk. It was the work of a few minutes to prepare the explosive compound. Having developed a slight bump of caution from earlier experiments in his boyhood in the manufacture of fireworks and explosive substances for celebrating the Fourth of July, he divided the half-teaspoonful or so of the dangerous substance into quite a number of small heaps on a sheet of blotting paper to avoid the danger of having the whole mass go off at once. One of the smaller heaps appearing to have dried, Wood touched it with a lead pencil. A crack like the report of a pistol resulted and a light cloud of violet smoke floated away from the scene of the explosion. All of the other piles had been scattered without exploding, as they were still in the wet condition. Professor Jackson walked up to his desk and said, “What was that, Mr. Wood?”

“Tri-iodide of nitrogen,” meekly answered the embarrassed young student.

“Please confine yourself to the experiment of the afternoon and do not let similar disturbances occur again,” said the Professor, coldly.

“No, sir,” replied Wood. Jackson turned away and walked down the laboratory. Presently there was another resounding crack as one of the students stepped on some of the material which had blown off on the floor and dried, and for the rest of the afternoon there were numerous scattered explosions from the scattered particles of tri-iodide. Later Wood discovered that a little of the material laid along the top of the back fence caused surprise to prowling cats.

In those great dawning days of increased academic independence, another member of the faculty at Harvard who did not discourage daring and originality was the immortal William James. Wood took his course in psychology, and carried into that field also a violent curiosity and a tendency toward independent research. One of the requirements in James’s course was that each student should write a thesis on some chosen subject. Wood, who disliked rhetorical and dialectic writing and who had barely passed in his course in English composition, cast about for a way to avoid the necessity. It so happened that James at the time was conducting his celebrated “American Census on Hallucinations” and was being swamped with returns to the questionnaires with which he had flooded the country by mail. The census was designed to throw light on what percentage of people “had visions,” “heard voices,” had premonitions which came true or other unusual psychic experiences. More than fifteen hundred answers had already come in, and he was staggered by the accumulating mass of material which piled up awaiting inspection and analysis. Young Wood was offered — or wangled — the job of collating this instead of doing his thesis. Despite the hard work involved, this was peaches and cream for Wood, who is congenitally possessed with a violent and inordinate curiosity.

This was in Wood’s sophomore year, 1888. A good proportion of the hallucinatory responses, of course, were from religious fanatics, while a scattering few were from “dopes.” He has remembered all these years a rather sweet one that came from a dear old lady in Pennsylvania.

My dear Professor James,

I often have dreams and visions that have an interpretational meaning, and am a sincere believer that God reveals himself to us now in visions, as he did in the days of Abram and the prophets — but such persons must be pure in heart, thought, and word, and be a total abstainer from tea, coffee, and other stimulants.

Very truly yours,

Mrs. J. Cunningham.

As all who have read Varieties of Religious Experience will recall, William James was outspokenly interested in what he termed “the anaesthetic revelation”, to wit, the type of visions and hallucinations produced under ether and dentist’s gas or by the use of vision-stimulating drugs. Some of the answers dealt with this phase of the subject, and this may partly explain the fact that the young sophomore presently conceived the bright idea of trying a shot at it himself. He had read of the strange illusions produced by hashish, and asked Professor James one day if there was any danger in it. James, who was an M. D. as well as a psychologist, measured his words and replied, perhaps with a smile:

“As a professor in this university, I can hardly give my official sanction to what you seem to be proposing. But as a doctor of medicine, I see no objection to stating that so far as I know there is no recorded case of death from an overdose of cannabis indica, nor is there any evidence for believing that one dose would be habit forming.”

So Rob secured and swallowed in due course a suitable quantity of the horrific oriental drug which is supposed to derive its common name from the Old Man of the Mountain and the Assassins. He had read, and correctly, that smoking it, even to excess, produced no actual hallucinations, but merely acted as a narcotic stimulant, as does the sniffing of cocaine.

Wood had dosed himself thoroughly, and had a long series of hallucinations, “some horrible, some glorious, magnificent, some filled with the awful grandeur of space and eternity.” I am happy to report that he also turned into a fox. Next day he wrote an account of his adventure. Here’s the part about the fox, and about a terrific two-headed doll full of pointed prophecy and symbolism:

I next enjoyed a sort of metempsychosis. Any animal or thing that I thought of could be made the being which held my mind. I thought of a fox, and instantly I was transformed into that animal. I could distinctly feel myself a fox, could see my long ears and bushy tail, and by a sort of introvision felt that my complete anatomy was that of a fox. Suddenly the point of vision changed. My eyes seemed to be located at the back of my mouth; I looked out between the parted lips, saw the two rows of pointed teeth, and, closing my mouth with a snap, saw — nothing….

Towards the end of the delirium the whirling images [referred to earlier] appeared again, and I was haunted by a singular creation of the brain, which reappeared every few moments. It was an image of a double-faced doll, with a cylindrical body running down to a point like a peg-top.

It was always the same, having a sort of crown on its head, and painted in two colors, green and brown, on a background of blue. The expression of the Janus-like profiles was always the same, as were the adornments of the body[3].

He had written his account at the request of Professor James, who included it in his Principles of Psychology. In the meantime, Rob had submitted a version of it to the New York Sunday Herald, entitled,

KINGDOM OF THE DREAM

AN ACCOUNT OF THE HASHISH PHANTASIA AS EXPERIENCED BY A NOVICE

It was published in full, September 23, 1888, but he was enraged, and justly so I think, because they ran it simply as a “letter to the editor,” and didn’t pay him a penny for it. He wrote to complain and got a specious letter signed by the great James Gordon Bennett in person, saying that since the communication had been addressed to the “editor” it had been published as a letter, and that it was not the custom of the Herald to pay for things so used.

I doubt that Bennett had read the piece. I don’t think he’d have overlooked the headline possibilities of the fox — Harvard Man Changes into Fox.

Shaler was the only one who gave Robert Wood, Senior, encouragement as to his son’s future when a flood of bad marks brought the doctor to Cambridge to inquire personally among the teachers why his boy was doing so poorly. There were two sides to it, of course. Wood felt, not only at Harvard, but later throughout his studies at Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and Berlin, that individual initiative was generally frowned on by professors. In the field of ideas, Wood is an arrogant, at times an impatient, man, and I think he must have been at times an impatient, arrogant youth. I’m not sure he feels that anybody ever contributed very much to him as a scientist. To him the professors might or might not be useful associates in helping to carry out some idea, but he always felt that when ideas clashed, they might be the ones who were wrong. To most of the professors, naturally, he was — like the sheep in the Methodist hymn - “a wandering fox who would not be controlled.”

A good deal of light is cast on this by parts of his own notes covering the period, from which I now quote.

To be able to remove a condition in Greek and Roman History by getting a passing mark in Dr. Whiting’s course on Color Photography looked to me like robbing a child’s bank. I was very poor in the prescribed modern language courses, not realizing that a speaking knowledge of French might add much to one’s enjoyment of Parisian cafe life later on. Nor was I good in mathematics; in fact, I was very bad, both in algebra and trigonometry, which struck me as a fearful bore, as no hint was ever given, as far as I can remember, of what possible use you could ever make of sines, cosines, and tangents of angles. Curiously enough I had stood at the head of the class in plane geometry at Mr. Nichols’s school. I really enjoyed working out the original theorems, and I can’t remember ever having failed to get the solution, though some problems kept me up pretty late at night. There was another boy in the class who was tops in everything, and I worked hard to beat him in geometry, for I was rotten in most everything else. I remember that I worked out what Mr. Nichols accepted as an original solution of the pons asinorum of Euclid. The boy who was tops in everything never amounted to anything, however.

At Harvard I roomed alone in Thayer 66 the first two years, but at the end of my sophomore year was fortunate enough to draw, in collaboration with a classmate, double room 34 in the newly finished Hastings Hall. Our room had a big bay window on the first floor looking directly down the baseball field. The field was surrounded by the cinder track, so that we and our friends had a private box for all of the spring games. The big window seat had cupboards underneath which could be locked up. Here we stored the liquid refreshments. There was a tea table with cups, saucers, and a brass teakettle, for camouflage. It was occasionally used on Mother’s Day or when girls came to the games. We drank beer for the most part, but had sherry and whisky in reserve for jamborees. I drank only moderately, never passed out, and never suffered amnesia. Before reaching that stage, I always felt a strong distaste for anything more, and was having plenty of fun with what I had.

I dined at Memorial Hall, the Student Commons, with the six hundred other sufferers, in spite of the legend that a student had once found a human molar in a plate of beans.

I took no part in college athletics, except as an innocent bystander, until near the end of my senior year, when I suddenly decided to try for the Varsity tug-of-war team, and much to my amazement found myself in place number four just in front of big Higgins, the anchor, whom I next met in England shortly after the armistice of the World War. We trained for a month, and were all set for the Mott-Haven games with Yale, but learned on the eve of our departure that the event had been abolished for good and all, the day before, on account of its dangerous nature. We pulled on a plank walk, lying flat on our sides with our feet braced against high wooden cleats, the rope passing under the shoulder where it was gripped by the heavily rosined armpit of our heavy canvas jackets. The anchor sat with his feet against a cleat and the rope, with one turn around his waist, held in both hands. It was the stupidest contest to watch, as neither team moved forward or back, the only movement visible to the spectators being that of the scarlet rag tied to the center of the rope. Moreover, it was extremely dangerous, many internal and other injuries having resulted from the straining of the muscles to the limit, when practically lashed to rope and wooden cleats. We were listening to “Information Please” on the radio one evening, and a question which stumped every one of the group at the microphone was “What team wins its event by moving backwards?”. Of course I instantly said to my family and guests, “Tug of war or boat crew,” forgetting at the moment that we never moved at all. “Tug of war” was the correct answer, all the same! Transportation between Cambridge and Boston was by horsecars, the first electric trolley arriving about 1890, celebrated by Oliver Wendell Holmes in his poem “The Broomstick Train.” It took about an hour to get into Boston for the theater or other places of diversion. There was a persistent rumor that Professor Blank was sometimes seen at the “Maison Dorée”, and that any student fortunate enough to catch sight of him there was sure of high marks in his course. This may have been an advertisement of the resort designed to attract collegiate custom.

The course of experimental lectures on electricity given by old Professor Lovering was attended by crowds of freshmen, chiefly because it was well known that a large glass marble, dropped on the top step of the long flight of stairs which led from the bottom to the top row of seats in the lecture hall, would roll slowly to the bottom, going bump, bump, bump. The experiments were apparently those which he had shown in his first lectures, possibly a half century before — dancing pith balls, electrical chimes, electrified wig, etc., many of which I had done years before in the Sturtevant factory. They were amusing, however, and he was a delightful old gentleman, and it was an easy way of removing a condition in Latin composition. My future roommate “took” the electrical course, but never attended the lectures. I coached him for three evenings and he got an A, while I got a B, which shows that he was smarter than I was, for he gave the answers in as few words as possible, while I tried to show off by writing too much, which always infuriates the examiners.

When Rob left Harvard in June, 1891, safely graduated with honorable mention in chemistry and natural history, despite the fact that he had doubtless “infuriated” more than one examiner, it was a relief and surprise to his family — and probably to some of the faculty as well.