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 Three. Alarms and Explosions

The legend that our Promethean poltergeist spat fire and crepitated flames when fate later made him a full professor — as did the unhappy bear beyond the mountain — is not untrue but garbled. The error is merely one of chronology and is readily understandable, since Wood regarded most professors as purple cows and might well have been upset when he became one.

Time embalmed the error when it wrote him up a couple of years ago, and there appeared in print another chronological mix-up concerning the period when he set fire to the boardinghouse hash. Both these Pantagruelian episodes occurred actually while he was still a student, doing postgraduate work at Johns Hopkins. He’s done even more outrageous things in his full professorial maturity, but it’s only fair to keep the record straight.

In the autumn of 1891, after his graduation from Harvard, he went to Johns Hopkins with the idea of taking a Ph. D. in chemistry, working principally with Professor Ira Remsen. The first thing he did was to find a boarding-house to live in — and the next thing he did was to set the hash on fire. There had long been in that college boarding-house an up — to — then unverifiable suspicion that the breakfast hash was made from scraps scraped from the boarders’ dinner plates the night before. It was a plausible suspicion because morning hash always followed on the heels of steak the night before. But how to prove it? Wood scratched his ear and said, “I think I can prove it… with a Bunsen burner and a spectroscope.” He knew that lithium chloride was a harmless substance which happened to resemble common salt, both in appearance and taste. He knew also that the spectroscope was capable of detecting the minutest traces of lithium in any material burned in a blue flame. Thus treated, it would show a crimson line. So the fiendish plot was hatched against the landlady, and when next they dined on beefsteak, Rob left some large and tempting scraps on his plate, liberally sprinkled with lithium chloride. Fragments of next morning’s hash were pocketed, carried to the laboratory, and cremated before the slit of the spectroscope. The telltale crimson lithium line appeared, faint but unmistakable. The story followed Wood throughout his whole career, and now has a number of international variants. One piece of embroidery places the episode in a German pension to which a distinguished American professor of chemistry was refused admission — because Wood and his lithium had been there first.

The fire-spitting episode occurred one day after a January thaw, as Wood was on his way back from the laboratory to that same boarding-house. The shortest route for the students was through a Negro section which had a grocery store where colored crowds collected every day at noon to sun themselves on the sidewalk. The street just then was flooded with water from curb to curb. Wood had learned that sodium, a soft, silvery metal, when thrown into water, will take fire spontaneously with a loud explosion and burn with a fierce, baleful yellow flame, emitting showers of sparks and clouds of white smoke. The next time he and his fellow-boarders were starting home for lunch, he carried in his pocket, in a small tin box, a ball of sodium about the size of a large marble. The big puddle spread in the street, and the Negroes were assembled as usual, sitting on boxes and old chairs in front of the grocery store. As Wood passed, he cleared his throat loudly and spat ostentatiously into the puddle, at the same time flipping the sodium ball, unnoticed, in the same direction. There was a terrific bang as they strode on, sparks flew, and a great flash of yellow fire blazed on the surface of the water. Behind them pandemonium broke loose — howls, prayers, overturned chairs, and one voice louder than all the rest:

“Out o’ my way, niggers! Dat man spit dat fire! He look young — but only de ole Devil, ole Satan hisself, can do dat!” Wood says this was his first successful “experiment” with the element which afterward, through experiments of a soberer nature, contributed to his world-wide fame.

A. B. Porter, a graduate student in physics, with whom he had formed a partnership in the perpetration of harmless diversions, collaborated with him in the construction of a giant megaphone, a cone of stiff cardboard nine feet long and about two feet in diameter at the larger end. (Megaphones of this type, only much smaller, were not offered for sale to the general public until four or five years later). With this they could project speech to an astonishing distance, addressing embarrassing remarks to people two or three blocks away. With a horn of this description one can speak without raising the voice, and the person addressed gets the impression that the speaker is very close to him. Being thus quite safe from detection, they would sit in Wood’s room on the top floor of the boardinghouse on McCulloh Street and watch for a promising victim. Once they caught sight of a roundsman twirling his night stick and talking to a girl under a corner gas lamp two blocks up the street. Resting the mouth of the great horn on the window sill and pointing it towards the philandering officer, they reminded him in a gentle voice that “All policemen have big feet.” To a person walking away from them at the end of the block, with no one else in sight, they would say, “I beg your pardon, but you’ve dropped something.” He would stop, look behind him, then down at his feet, then up at the windows above, and after meditating for a moment, move along.

During this year of hell-raising at Hopkins, Wood was conducting a transcontinental correspondence, viva voce, with the girl who later had the courage and audacity to take him on for life. He did this by means of wax phonograph cylinders which they mailed to and fro in old Royal baking-powder cans. He had rented two Edison recording mechanisms (you couldn’t buy them in those days) and had taught her to operate one of them. She lived in San Francisco. A priest lived in the room next to his in the boarding-house in Baltimore, and the walls between the rooms were thin. He used to cover his head and the machine with quilts to muffle the ardent words destined solely for the ears of his inamorata.

He had first met Miss Gertrude Ames when he was a sophomore at Harvard. She was a girl out of the Golden West, but of pure New England stock like his own. She had lived in California since her early childhood, but she was born in Boston, daughter of Pelham W. Ames, who was a grandson of Fisher Ames, first Congressman from Massachusetts during Washington’s administration. Her maternal grandmother was a sister of Wood’s father, so that she was a cousin, once removed. She had come East that winter to visit relatives in Boston and Cambridge. It was her first experience with snow and sub-zero weather. Robert took her tobogganing and sleigh riding. He began his courtship with a bottle of sulphuric acid! “The Courtship of a Coming Chemist” would be a happy title for the episode if it weren’t for his absurd antipathy for the Miles Standish word. Here’s what I found among his own notes covering that period.

Her hands got cold (on the sleigh ride), and I said, “How would a hot water bottle go?” “Fine,” she said, “but where do we get it?” “I make it,” I replied, pulling a quart wine bottle three-quarters full of cold water from under the seat. Also a bottle of sulphuric acid from which I poured some of the sirupy-looking liquid into the water. In ten seconds the bottle was so hot you could hardly handle it. As soon as it cooled down I added more acid, and when it reached the point at which the acid failed to raise the temperature I produced another bottle containing sticks of fused sodium hydroxide and added these a few at a time. In this way the bottle was kept almost boiling hot throughout our ride.

At the end of his junior year he had spent the summer vacation visiting the Ames family among the giant redwoods at their summer home in Ross Valley. Next winter Gertrude had come East again, this time to visit relatives in New York. Robert took the first train down from Cambridge, and when he returned to Harvard they were pledged for life. Following his graduation he was off to California again for the summer. He had wanted to get married immediately “but father had said no.” He entered Johns Hopkins University in the fall, and the wax-cylinder exchange was their way of bridging vocally the gap that separated them temporarily by the width of the whole continent.

In the intervals between the time devoted to this unique correspondence and the conducting of casual chemical deviltries, Robert managed to do a good deal of work under Remsen, and also frequently dropped in at Professor Henry Rowland’s laboratory to do odd experiments in spectroscopy and other things more closely related to physics than to chemistry.

Remsen used to reprove him for jumping over the traces, but one such digression, dictated at the time by sheer curiosity, was of real consequence many years later. He’d been working under Remsen in Organic Preparations. One day the task was the preparation of hydroquinone, following the routine formula and directions given in the textbook. (Its white crystals are the substance chiefly used for developing photographic plates.) For some reason he doesn’t now remember, he sought further information in Beilstein’s great treatise on Organic Chemistry and was intrigued by the statement that hydroquinone, when oxidized by ferric chloride, yielded something known as quinhydrone, which crystallized “in long, black needles, having a brilliant metallic luster.” While this promised no explosions, it promised at any rate a pleasing transformation which Robert’s curiosity craved to see. While he was at work on it, Remsen came by, looked at his crystallization dish, and said, “Well, what are you doing now?”.

“I’m making quinhydrone out of the hydroquinone”.

“Well,” snapped the great chemist, who, God knows, had followed plenty of divergent lines in his own time, some of which led up blind alleys and others to fame and glory, “you’re wasting your time; it would be much better to stick to the prescribed course until you learn the elements of organic chemistry. ”

Wood made the metallic crystals when Remsen’s back was turned, and they were so pretty he put them away like lightning bugs, in a bottle. The curious aftermath came forty years later. A New York doctor claimed to have discovered a mysterious new substance which would prevent sunburn if mixed with a face cream, and had offered it, demanding huge royalties, to the president of a well-known manufacturing company. The latter, with Scotch canniness, unwilling to buy a pig in a poke, and reluctant for that matter to pay for the pig at all if he could help it, managed to obtain a sample and submitted it for analysis to Dr. Wood — who had long since become Professor of Experimental Physics in charge of research in the same sacred halls where Remsen had scolded him. Wood was extremely skeptical that a New York doctor had invented any new chemical substance, despite the fact that members of the Chemistry Department who had volunteered to make an analysis of it for him had failed to identify it after several days and had given up the job.

Wood, meanwhile, had been trying it with the spectroscope. The sample was in liquid form, of a light amber color. Photographing its absorption spectrum with ultraviolet light, he had discovered — somewhat to his surprise — that it did indeed eliminate the harmful rays from sunlight. From his knowledge of absorption spectra, his first guess was that it must be a solution of salicylic acid. From his knowledge of chemistry, he knew that if his guess was right, the solution would turn blue when treated with ferric chloride. He tried this — and found his guess was wrong. The mysterious solution remained the same color as before. On the following morning, however, lo and behold, the watch glass on which the test had been made was covered with a crystallized layer of long black needles which shone with a brilliant metallic luster!

“Now where,” said Dr. Wood to himself, “have I seen those before?” And since he has the memory of the proverbial Hindu elephant — “Where indeed but in that little bottle put away long years ago when I was but a pup!”

The crystals were the same old quinhydrone, and, quod erat demonstrandum, the pig in a poke was no new chemical substance, but the same old hydroquinone used by every photographer — unmasked by what it had done when dosed with ferric chloride.

“So that’s what it is,” Wood told the cosmetic magnate. “You can buy all you want of it cheaply at any drug supply house — and it does just what that doctor said it would — but if you mix it with any of your skin creams or beach lotions, God help the gals who use it! ”

“Why?” said the cold-cream king.

“Because,” said Wood, “it’s a skin irritant, and photographers use rubber gloves when they mess about with it.”

That ended it for the big manufacturer, but later on the New York doctor’s “discovery” was promoted by a “beauty specialist,” and all the women at a certain seaside resort broke out with a frightful skin rash, after which the discovery and discoverer disappeared into oblivion.

In January, 1892, Robert’s father died. After due reflection Robert decided to cut short his studies at Johns Hopkins and get married that coming April. In the meantime he had been playing hooky more and more from chemistry, running over continually to Rowland’s laboratory in the physics building, and had “bothered Rowland almost to death” trying out all sorts of extracurricular things there. He wanted to spend part of the wedding trip in Alaska, and went over one day to ask Rowland, who had been up there, some questions about Alaskan travel — and incidentally to say good-by and thank him.

Rowland was a gruff great man, laconic.

“What d’you want to find out about Alaska for?”

“Well,” Wood said, shifting from one foot to the other, “I’m leaving for California next week to get married, and I want to include Alaska in our wedding trip…

“Huh,” said Rowland with a snort, “tried everything else. Going to try that now, are you?”

So Robert Williams Wood, no longer Junior, was married to Gertrude Ames on the nineteenth of April, 1892, in San Francisco. He was twenty-four, six feet tall, square-jawed, blue-eyed, dominant, handsome as Lucifer. She was younger, slender, lovely, above the medium in height, with an abundance of honey-colored hair. It was an indissoluble marriage.

Accustomed, both of them, to all the luxuries, they began their wedding journey (via the hotels at Monterey and Santa Barbara) with a camping trip to the King’s River Canyon, three hundred miles from any railroad, mostly on horseback, carrying no beds but only their blanket rolls and a tent, with a strange roughneck nicknamed the “Dancing Bear” for guide and packman. He was said to be an English fugitive from justice. He was squat and powerful, less than five feet high, with a brown-red beard cut to a blunt point, giving him a bearlike profile. His hands hung nearly to his knees. Reversing Kipling’s crack at Russia, he was the man that walked like a bear. As a lady’s maid, he must have been a marvel. They started from Moore’s Lumber Mills, where they’d obtained the horses and provisions, and went deep into the canyon. They made camp with couches of pine branches and a stove built with stones, lived mostly on bacon, pan bread, and trout from the stream.

Even for his wedding trip, Wood had not overlooked the possibilities of chemical foolishness. One of the chemicals which Remsen’s students had to prepare was fluorescein, that remarkable substance, a speck of which the size of a pinhead dissolved in a barrel of water will cause it to glow in the sunshine with a brilliant emerald-green light. Aviators shot down in the ocean in the present war are using it to create an enormous green spot on the surface of the water, easily seen by rescue planes.

The Yellowstone Park, which he had visited the year before, was to be included in the itinerary, and it occurred to Wood that Old Faithful geyser would be a real spectacle if heavily charged with fluorescein. So he made a pint of the material in the form of a thick dark-brown sirupy mass, tightly corked in a wide-mouthed bottle, enough to make a small lake fluorescent, and stored it in his baggage.

On the way East, after adventures from California to Alaska and back, they made the grand tour of the Yellowstone, and Wood got ready for the geyser with his bottle of fluorescein. Of this episode, he says:

We found Old Faithful too well watched by the guards to accomplish anything there, but I remembered an even better spot, the celebrated Emerald Spring. A big party of tourists with a guide was about to start on foot for it, but I knew the way and we two started ahead of them, and found the great spring deserted. A strong flow of water was coming up from the depths of the funnel, and as soon as we heard the voices of the tourists, I uncorked the bottle of fluorescein and threw it into the center of the pool. Down it went deeper and deeper until it was lost to view, leaving a green trail to mark its path. Nothing happened for a minute or two, and then there rolled up slowly from the depths a great cumulus cloud like a thunderhead of a dazzling green color, which grew larger and more complicated in form as it neared the surface, and by the time the tourists arrived, the whole pool was glowing in the hot sunshine with the brilliance and color of an emerald. We heard the guide intoning monotonously his patter: “This here, ladies and gentlemen, is the Emerald Spring, so called from the greenish color of — my God, I’ve never seen it like this, and I’ve been here ten years!” The tourists were entranced, and so were we.

Since marriage had increased his expenses and responsibilities, and since he was a practical New Englander despite his fantasies, the young man began looking around for some not too costly way of continuing his studies. The then newly formed University of Chicago suggested itself to his mind. It was being publicized as the most lavish academic set-up of all time. Rumor had it that the catalogue weighed fourteen pounds, and that it contained reference to three courses in chemistry — all devoted to compounds which didn’t even exist! So Wood applied for a job, and got it in the autumn of 1892, after what I would call his honeymoon. (He detests the word. His notes which covered that happy period are entitled “Travel Subsequent to Marriage”.) He had asked to become an assistant in chemistry and was appointed honorary fellow in chemistry. It was really a job as “bottle washer for Stokes”, he says — and the honor carried with it no honorarium. All it did was to give him free access to the laboratory. I want to quote at not too great a length from his notes covering the next couple of years, though there’s scarcely any mention in them of the laboratory, or of the university either for that matter. I quote because I think they throw, between the lines, additional light on his character. I have never known exactly what the phrase “practical joke” means, but I do know that a lot of practical jokers deserve to be killed with an ax. Now Robert Williams Wood, from early childhood and today in his honored maturity, plays pranks which are sometimes appalling. But there is a curious mingling of deviltry and kindness in the man which has kept him not only admired but loved by most of his butts and victims. I’m told, not by him, that their old Irish maid Sarah, for instance, viewed him as a benevolent if eccentric demigod. Here are a couple of pages lifted from his own notes on Sarah.

We took a “flat,” as it was called in those days, in an apartment building on the South Side. The Chemistry Department was housed temporarily in a new and very unpretentious apartment house, the rear windows of which commanded a fine view of the rising buildings of the World’s Columbian Exposition. We were just opposite the great Ferris wheel, and watched its growth from birth.

Gertrude was lucky in her choice of a maid of all work, a tall gaunt Irish girl of some forty summers who was a splendid cook, but eccentric. Sarah was innocent as a child of ten and faithful as an old plantation darky. I had bought a tricky apparatus designed to gull the gullible. It was called “The Magic Money-Maker.” A long strip of black cambric was wound up on two parallel rollers, one of which could be turned by a crank, winding up the cloth from its neighbor. You loaded up one side with new five-dollar bills and by feeding strips of white paper in succession between the rollers, out came the bills. It was a perfect optical illusion. I showed it to Sarah, who viewed it with open eyes. Later she came to me holding out an old dollar bill that had been torn in halves and asked hopefully, “Wud the machine mend it?”

“Oh, yes,” I said — and then I remembered that the machine was loaded with five-dollar bills — “but you’ll have to wait a minute as I have to change it for mending”. I couldn’t find a one-dollar bill in the house for some time, but finally located a fairly new one in an old pair of pants. Slipping this into the machine, I was ready for Sarah, and as the torn bill slowly passed into the little black “clothes wringer,” out came a fairly fresh bank note. She was enraptured, rushed off to her room, and presently reappeared with a frayed, moldy, and partly torn document. “An’ cud yer do anything with this, Mister Wud?” “What’s that?” I asked. “Well, yer see, Mister Wud, whin I was leavin’ off wurkin’ for Mrs. Jones in Kansas City, the where I’d bin wurkin’ for her for tin years, Mister Jones, who was in the lumber business, said for me not to be puttin’ the sivin hundred dollars I’d saved up in the savin’s bank, the where I’d be loosin’ it, but to invist it in his business where it wud be safe, and he’d be givin’ me six per cent, the while the savin’s bank wud be givin’ me only three per cent — so I give it to him and he give me this paper.” “Have you ever asked him to return the money?” I asked. “Oh, no”, she said, blushing, “I’d not be after naydin it unless I’d be gittin’ married”.

“The machine is no good for fixing your paper”, I said, “but if you’ll give it to me I’ll see what I can do for you. I’m afraid, though, you may never be able to get your money back.” Sarah burst into tears, and Gertrude tried to comfort her. The paper was a promissory note properly executed, and I took it downtown to my bank. “Pretty hopeless,” the paying teller said, “but we’ll send it in for collection and see what happens.” Within a week I was informed that it had been promptly paid with interest to date, and I took Sarah down to the bank, introduced her to the teller, and had her deposit it all in the savings bank. Good old Jones of Kansas City, I take off my hat to you!

Revelatory too, I think, is Wood’s own description of an evening he spent with a multimillionaire lumber king isolated in the wilds of Wisconsin — whose passion was astronomy. Taken with all its implications, it is a rather beautiful and to me unforgettable story. I should like to have been there that night when Rob was young, nearly fifty years ago.

Here is Wood’s account.

One summer when the term was over we wanted to get out of Chicago before the hot weather, on account of the baby, and so with old Sarah promoted temporarily to the position of nurse, we started off for Twin Lakes, a remote fishing resort in northern Wisconsin. Our itinerary called for a change of cars at 7: 00 p. m. at a railroad intersection. The station was of the boxcar type, and no other house was in sight, nothing but pine woods. As our little train steamed away into the darkening forest we looked for the other train which was to carry us on our way, but there was nothing in sight. The old codger who was ticket agent, telegraph operator, freight and baggage man — and tout for the only hotel in the place, as we learned presently — told us our train didn’t go until next morning, but that there was a hotel up the road a piece.

Gertrude said, “You go along and explore, because it may be worse than the station”.

The baby was crying as I left, and the outlook seemed unpromising, for we were in a wild, unbuilt-up lumber district. Up the hill a few hundred yards away, the hotel loomed through the trees, a huge old ramshackle building with most of the weather-beaten blinds hanging askew on a single hinge. Many windowpanes were broken, and all the rooms in the two upper stories dark. But on the ground floor things were pretty lively. It was Saturday night and the lumberjacks had their weekly pay envelopes. There were bright lights, the sound of a hurdy-gurdy piano, and the thud, thud of lumbermen dancing in heavy boots; men were three deep along the bar, and others of less gay appearance were absorbed in poker. It offered dubious night’s lodging for a young mother and baby. I went away from there and moved along up the road, coming eventually to a high fence which appeared to surround some sort of an estate. There was a lodge or office at the gate and a cue of fifteen or twenty evil-looking men waiting for their pay envelopes, which were being passed out through a window. After the line had been attended to, I approached the window and explained my predicament. The young paying teller told me to come in and sit down, he would see what could be done about it. He was back again in a few minutes with the information that I was to bring my family; that Mr. S------- would take care of us. I hurried back to the forlorn little group sitting on a baggage truck with the news that we were to be house guests of the big boss.

We presently found ourselves being admitted to a mansion by a manservant who announced that dinner would be served in fifteen minutes, and would we like to be shown our room in the meantime? Sarah and the baby had been spirited off to another part of the house.

Downstairs in the dining-room we found prepared for us a splendid dinner of broiled steak, fried potatoes, corn fritters, fruit, and coffee — but no sign of our host. Later, after Gertrude and the baby were safely upstairs, he appeared with a box of cigars and suggested we go out on the lawn where it was cooler. Drinks were brought presently, and it turned out that he was an amateur astronomer! It was a clear night and the stars fairly blazed. He asked question after question and I told him everything I knew — how they measured the velocity of the stars in space by the shift of the lines in the spectrum, about the nebular hypothesis, why some comets return and some do not, and matters of that sort. Every time I suggested bed, he poured another round of drinks and pushed over the box of cigars. It was three o’clock when we finally turned in. He did not appear at breakfast next morning. After a slight delay due to some eccentricity of the baby, we were driven in state to the boxcar station, where we found that the train was being held for us by the request of our host!

Later we learned that he was the “lumber king” of Wisconsin. It was my first meeting with an American captain of industry, or tycoon, as he would now be called. He was truly interested in astronomy, and had said a thing so extremely gracious it embarrassed me. When I thanked him for his hospitality, he had quoted the line about “entertaining an angel unaware”.

Wood’s official “job” at the University of Chicago was confined largely to cleaning up apparatus after Professor Henry N. Stokes’s lectures, and he presently resigned that appointment in favor of the janitor. Here is Wood’s own description of what followed.

Professor E. A. Schneider, a German, captured me for “research work,” suggesting what he described as a very interesting line of work on titanium. The first stage of the “research” was the preparation of a large quantity of potassium titanofluoride, a chemical that was not on the market. I would need a platinum dish and some of the mineral rutile, which he said he would order for me. The dish turned out to be as big as a finger bowl, and cost three hundred dollars, which I had to pay out of my own pocket, and there was about twenty pounds of rutile, which I had to pound in a mortar and pass through a fine sieve, until the whole mass was reduced to a powder as fine as pepper. It took about two weeks, and the black powder got in my hair and my nose, and over my clothes. Then came several weeks of work in fusing a mixture of potassium carbonate and the powder in the platinum dish, treating the mess with hydrofluoric acid, and crystallizing the product. I began to chafe over the monotony of going through this process over and over again, but Schneider kept me at it until the whole mass of rutile had been converted into the double salt. I said, “Well, what do we do now?” and was told that nothing more was to be done on the problem at present, and he would give me something else to do in the meantime. I smelled a rat, or I might more properly say a skunk, and spoke to Dr. Lengfeld about the work. He intimated that he thought I would make more progress if I took a real problem instead of serving as a manufacturer of chemicals.

So I left Schneider, who appropriated the large bottles of the preparation on which I had spent so much time and money. Later on I was told that he probably wanted it for some of his own work, and he even offered to take the platinum dish off my hands for half price, but that didn’t work. I started work under Felix Lengfeld’s direction and gradually forgot the unpleasant experience. Schneider left the university a year or two later. Years later, looking through the volumes of the German periodical, Anorganische Chemie, I found a paper by Schneider on the chemistry of titanium, in which he stated that he employed as his basic material the compound potassium titanofluoride, with no acknowledgments or statement of where he obtained it. He just took it out of a hat, like a rabbit. I kept the platinum dish for several years and eventually sold it for more than I had paid for it.

After my routine with rutile, I started a more interesting piece of work under Dr. Lengfeld’s direction, and published two papers in the American Chemical Journal. I reported the results of my research work at the weekly meeting of the Chemistry Colloquium, and felt a little nervous, as it was the first time that I had appeared before a critical audience. The subject was rather technical, and I had formed a resolve never to “read” a paper. It went off fairly well, and I found that embarrassment faded away rapidly as I went on.

Shortly after, I was asked to give a popular lecture with experiments, open to the public in the auditorium of the new Kent chemical laboratory. I chose as a subject “The Vortex Atom Theory,” propounded first by Lord Kelvin, and later developed by Professor Helmholtz of Berlin, which was receiving some attention by chemists at the time. I chose this subject chiefly because I wanted at least one spectacular lecture experiment that would make the audience sit up, and I decided that a huge “vortex machine” for making smoke rings would fulfill the requirements. I made a big one, bigger than I had ever seen, a cubic wooden box four feet on each edge, one side made of flexible thin oilcloth, loosely tacked on, with two diagonal strips of rubber tubing behind it, firmly attached to the corners. At the center of the opposite side was a circular hole about a foot in diameter. On striking the center of the square of oilcloth a smart blow with the fist, an invisible ring of air was shot from the box with such velocity and momentum that it would knock a large pasteboard box from the end of the lecture table onto the floor, while the impact on the face or body felt like a mild blow from a feather pillow. By filling the box with smoke produced by mixing the vapors of ammonia and hydrochloric acid, the rings were made visible, and the classical experiments with them could be shown on a large scale. With a little practice, two rings could be fired in rapid succession: the second ring, with a higher velocity, would catch up with the first and bounce off it, both rings remaining intact and changing into vibrating ellipses. This showed that a gas in rapid rotation had some of the properties of a solid (elasticity, for example). The “vortex atom” theory supposed that chemical atoms were endless vortices in the “ether of space,” tied in complicated knots, for it had been shown that if two or more vortex rings of a frictionless fluid were linked together or tied in knots they would spin forever, without interfering with each other or coming to rest. I had some other experiments which I’ve forgotten, but the big box came at the end of the lecture. When it was pointing skyward an invisible ring of air splashed against and extinguished the greater part of the circular ring of gas flames at the center of the auditorium dome. Two or three always remained lit, and the fire then ran around the entire ring, so that the experiment could be shown over and over again as fast as you could thump the box. Then I commenced a Blitzkrieg on the audience, shooting powerful invisible rings at the sea of faces. The spectators were delighted and applauded loudly, and I finally took courage and fired a ring at Mrs. Harper, the wife of the President, which lifted the front of her broad-brimmed hat several inches, and then one into the broad, smiling face of the President himself, who winced.

We now come to the early spring of 1894. Wood had finished a piece of research acceptable to the Department of Chemistry as a thesis for the Ph. D. degree, and the examinations were in the offing. He was, however, suddenly informed that he would be required to pass examinations in advanced physics and mathematics if he wished to come up in physical chemistry. This change in the requirements had resulted from the advent of A. A. Michelson as head of the Department of Physics. Wood had a long and somewhat heated argument with President Harper, claiming that he had not been told this in the beginning and was not well enough prepared in either subject to take examinations on such short notice. Harper overruled his objections, and Wood left the university early in May.

He had definitely decided anyway, at this time, to go to Germany with his family, to work with Professor Wilhelm Ostwald, then the world’s leading physical chemist. But it was necessary to put off the trip because of the imminent arrival of their second child.

Accordingly, the Woods packed up, stored their furniture, and went out to San Francisco to visit Gertrude’s parents. Robert Wood, Junior, was born on June 23, 1894, in his grandmother’s house.

After an interval for Gertrude’s recovery, both the Woods began to study German furiously. Their first tutor was a red- bearded young German, with a facetious manner and a craving for Mr. Ames’s best cigars. His visits resembled social calls, and in fact, since he preferred to talk in English, the German lessons were a flop. It was difficult to get rid of anyone so polite, however, and finally Wood hit on a way of getting rid of the man. He substituted a trick cigar for one of Mr. Ames’s Coronas. And when Herr Becker, at the next lesson, lighted it, there was a bang. It had exploded.

Their next teacher was a Frau Lilienthal, who was excellent. She gave them a letter to Professor Leo, Germany’s foremost Shakespearean scholar, who afterwards proved very hospitable to the Woods.

Late in the summer of 1894, the Woods started East with the two children, Margaret and Robert, Junior, bound for Berlin.