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 Four. Studies in Berlin

There turned out to be only one water closet in the Leipzig pension where Wood, wife, and babies were to live while he studied chemistry with Ostwald. Moreover, it opened directly off the dining-room! Robert says his father “chose” Harvard for him, and there’s a story that it was Mrs. Wood, influenced by this open plumbing openly arrived at, who “chose” to go on to Berlin.

My own impression is that nobody ever successfully “chose” anything for Wood unless it chanced to coincide with his own choice. Anyhow, wife, babies, bags and baggage, they went to Berlin.

What seems to have first struck and stimulated Robert’s best — or worst — instincts in the German capital was the abundance of signs, placards, and police injunctions indicating that many trivial personal actions, free in democratic countries, were here either forbidden or state controlled. He had known, of course, about the Verboten placards, but not about the Strengsten untersagt ones. They translate literally “strengthily undersaid”, and while Robert insists they merely amused him, I suspect they had the same effect a red flag is supposed to have on the proverbial bull.

The first one he saw was over the window of his compartment in a railway coach, framed under glass in a neat oval bronze frame. It read:

DAS HINAUSLEHNEN DES KÖRPER

ASU DEM FENSTER, IST WEGEN

DER DAMIT VERBUNDENEN LEBENS-

GEFAHR STRENGSTEN UNTERSAGT

(“The leaning out of the body out of the window, is on account of the thereby intimately-bound-up-life-danger strengthily undersaid.”)

He improvised a screw driver, removed the placard, frame and all, put it in his pocket, and subsequently hung it in his room, to study the last two words if and when inspiration flagged. He went out and bought boomerangs, and began throwing them. He rolled rocks down neighboring German mountainsides, creating miniature avalanches. He made flights in Lilienthal’s glider. He set up a huge camera in the street and photographed a cesspool pump in action, under the impression, pretended or real, that he was photographing the Berlin Fire Department.

Richard Watson Gilder, then editor of Century, had been equally stimulated by “Strengsten untersagt”, and had written a poem about it. Young Wood learned the poem by heart and frequently declaimed it at dinner parties. The first two stanzas run:

Robert made up another stanza concerning his own Kinder. You had to license and put a number plate on the Kinderwagen (baby buggy) since it was “a vehicle on four wheels.”

Our young father of buggy-licensed babies had meanwhile, of course, begun his studies in the chemistry department at the University of Berlin. After some time spent, however, in dull routine and the working out of “some particularly stupid problems,” he began to drift more and more, as he had at Johns Hopkins, into the physics laboratories and lectures, to see what was happening there. Things looked more exciting, and after talking with Professor Rubens, who spoke perfect English, Wood took the plunge: he was definitely tired of physical chemistry and decided that physics would be his field.

He was told he could not start on research until he had performed all the preliminary experiments of the Kleine Practicum, which corresponds to undergraduate laboratory work in America. They were willing, however, to take his word that he had already done all but some half dozen of the experiments. The first experiment they required him to make was the accurate determination of the time of oscillation of a torsion pendulum, i.e., a large metal disk, suspended at its center by a wire, which slowly rotates first to the right and then to the left. On reading the instructions and thinking over the matter, Wood decided he knew a better method. On trial it proved to be simpler and more accurate than the classical one in use in the laboratory. Professor Blasius, who directed the work, was so much impressed that he asked Wood to write a paper on the subject; and Professor Warburg, the Director of the Physical Institute, approved its publication in the Annalen der Physik.

Thus Wood’s formal entry into the field of physics was marked by an example of the experimental daring that was to characterize all his future work. He continued to experiment on the side; and two papers of his — one on a lecture method of showing the nature of optical “caustics” and the other an ingenious method of determining the duration of the flash of an exploding gas — were published in the London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine (commonly known as the Philosophical Magazine, or, more intimately, as Phil. Mag.), which was the leading English-language review in physics.

But the most exciting scientific event of Wood’s Berlin days was to come. Here is his own account of it:

One memorable morning in the early winter of 1895 Professor Blasius came to us in great excitement. “Come this way, something very wonderful has just been received”. We hurried along after him into one of the smaller rooms, where hanging on the wall were half a dozen or more strange-looking photographs, a life-size human hand with all of the bones clearly outlined, a purse with a number of coins inside, a bunch of keys inside a wooden box, and other objects. “What in the world are they?” we asked. “They just arrived”, he replied, “in the Geheimrath’s morning mail. Professor Roentgen of Würzburg sent them. They were made by some new kind of rays that penetrate most opaque substances and cast shadows on the photographic plate of metals and other dense materials. He calls them X rays, because x represents an unknown quantity in algebra, and he has no idea what they are. They come from the glass wall of a vacuum tube, where the cathode rays strike it”.

Later in the day Warburg came to my room holding in his hand the little ten-page reprint of Roentgen’s paper, asking me if I cared to read it, and if so, to please leave it on his desk after lunch. The pages had not been cut, so I cut them up the side and along the top, read the paper, and left it on his desk.

Early in the afternoon he came to my room in a rage. “Herr Wood, why have you cut these pages?” going on to say that he had borrowed the reprint from the newsstand on the corner (they were on sale all over Berlin, at ten cents a copy), that Roentgen would send him a copy, and that now he would have to pay the news dealer, as I had spoiled the copy by cutting the pages. I said that he had suggested that I read it, and that I couldn’t very well read it without cutting the pages. “Why not?” he replied. “You can read it this way” (holding his finger between the pages, spreading them apart, and peeking in from the bottom). “That is what I did”. I said I’d be delighted to pay the news dealer and keep the copy myself. “Good. You can do that”, he beamed. I still have the reprint!

Within a day or two the laboratory was humming with the buzz of the vibrating spring interrupters of every Ruhmkorff induction coil that could be found in the instrument cases. Everyone who could blow glass and had access to an air pump was busy making the pear-shaped glass bulbs, sealing in electrodes, and laboriously exhausting them with cumbersome mercury pumps, which were all that we had at the time. The laboratory had gone X-ray mad. We photographed our hands, mice, small birds, and all sorts of things. I wrote a long story of the discovery, illustrated with photographs, and sent it to the leading Chicago newspaper. This was the first account to reach America, with the exception of a five-line cable. It was returned by the editor saying that they had already published a full-page story in the Sunday issue, illustrated with photographs made by a South Side photographer, who had antedated and beaten Roentgen — he had photographed the insides of a piano through the case, the vitals of a typewriter through its tin cover, and other impossible subjects, all transparent fakes of course.

I remailed the article immediately to the Century Magazine; it appeared in the next number, and even with this long delay it was the first comprehensive communication on Roentgen’s discoveries to appear in America.

When the required laboratory experiments were finished, it was customary for the newcomer to ask some professor’s help in choosing a subject for research. But one or two ideas had occurred to me while reading, and I had found a corner in the attic of the laboratory that was ideal for private experiments. It was roomy and out of the way. Moreover, it was a storeroom for old apparatus and barrels full of discarded vacuum tubes and glass bulbs used by the celebrated Goldstein, some of whose discoveries on the discharge of electricity in high vacua had antedated those of Crookes in England.

I hunted up an old induction coil and storage battery and played for a few days with some of Goldstein’s old vacuum tubes, often reading his papers. Nothing was known at the time of the nature of electrical discharges in gases at low pressure, and there was much discussion about the temperature of the luminous gas in vacuum tubes, which had never been determined experimentally by a method free from objections. The typical discharge in a long glass tube containing, say, hydrogen gas at low pressure, and furnished with wire electrodes at each end which carry the current from a high potential storage battery of many hundred small cells, is a rose- colored column of light, broken up into disk-shaped stratifications, extending two-thirds of the way down the tube from the positive electrode, then a dark space in which the gas is nonluminous, though obviously carrying the electrical current, and finally a blue glow extending out from the disk which forms the negative electrode but separated from it by another and very narrow dark space. An unsolved question was the distribution of temperature in this complicated discharge. Were the luminous parts hot and the dark spaces cold, or was the temperature sensibly the same throughout the tube?

I told Professor Rubens I should like to investigate this question and thought that it could be done with a bolometer arranged in such a way that the instrument could be moved along the discharge when the tube was excited. The bolometer measures temperature by the change in the resistance of an exceedingly fine platinum wire when heated, and therefore requires two wires leading to a galvanometer and battery. “And how then will you move a bolometer about inside a vacuum tube?” asked Rubens. I thought it could be done by mounting the discharge tube on the top of a barometer tube, with the bolometer wire on the upper end of a narrow glass tube carrying the two wires and passing up through the mercury column of the barometer. The open end of the barometer tube was to dip into a tall glass jar filled with mercury, and the narrow tube, carrying the bolometer at the top and bent into a long U at the bottom, passed down through the mercury column and up through the jar into the outside air. By raising or lowering the exposed arm of the U, the bolometer could be made to traverse the discharge tube. Rubens thought the idea good, and spoke of it to Warburg, the director. I was given a small room to myself, with an air pump for exhausting the tube or changing the pressure, and the necessary electrical equipment. I found an old Goldstein tube in the attic, which was exactly what I wanted, and started setting up my equipment.

The investigation with the movable bolometer occupied me for the better part of three semesters, and turned out even better than I’d hoped, for I was able not only to measure the temperature in the main parts of the discharge but also to record its slight rise and fall, as the bolometer loop of thin wire passed through the luminous disks of the stratifications. This method of exploring the interior of vacuum tubes became standard practice and has been used in many subsequent investigations by others.

Wood’s account of the Berlin period is not confined entirely to laboratory research. There are two colorful spots, one having to do with getting stuck on a pinnacle during a vacation rock- climb in Switzerland, and the other telling of adventures with the ill-fated Lilienthal and his glider. The rock-climb comes first, and here’s what he wrote about it:

I’m no mountain climber, much less a rock-climber, but when we went up from Interlaken to the Schynige Platte, which commands a marvelous view of the Jungfrau, Mönch, and Eiger, I was intrigued by a curious rock rising like the tower of an old castle and aptly named the “Gummihorn”. It was gray in color and resembled old, rotten rubber.

Baedeker said its summit had been recently made “accessible to experts”. It rose abruptly from a green hill only a few hundred yards from the hotel, and I decided to have a look at it after lunch. It was about a hundred and fifty feet in diameter at its base and perhaps three hundred feet high, the walls being practically perpendicular. Finding a place with a slight incline from the perpendicular I commenced to crawl up, finding numerous toe and finger holds. About half way up I found myself standing on a narrow ledge possibly ten inches in width, and faced by a smooth perpendicular wall about six and a half feet high. A bit of rope hung over the edge, and I could see that the other end was fastened to an iron spike driven into the rock of a second ledge above me. This evidently represented Baedeker’s “recently made accessible”. Clinging to a crevice with my left hand, I took hold of the rope with my right and gingerly pulled. As I pulled harder, it broke at the point where it was in contact with the sharp edge of the rock. I nearly let go with my left hand, but managed to keep my hold. I looked down. The grass looked pretty far away, and I began to doubt whether I could find the toe holds for descent. Finally I decided to climb on to the top and be rescued by the fire department. I managed to pull myself to the next ledge by means of the iron spike, and from here on to the top found the climbing easier. A group of Germans on a neighboring hill raised their hats on their Alpine stocks and shouted Hoch! Hoch! when I appeared on the summit, but I was too much shaken to do more than give an indifferent wave in return. I managed to get down by a slightly less difficult path. It was comic-opera mountaineering in miniature.

We had planned to walk back to Interlaken, but Gertrude was tired and elected to go by train. I had observed that I could save a long walk around the edge of the mountain if I walked through the railway tunnel. There was a large sign saying that traversing the tunnel on foot was “strengthily undersaid” and punishable by a heavy fine. It got darker and darker in the tunnel, and I could walk straight only by trailing the bottom of my Alpine stock along one of the rails. Then I heard behind me the chug-chug of the little locomotive, which carried no headlight. I was really scared, and hurried along stumbling over the ties in the darkness. I seemed to be holding my own with the little engine, however, and presently emerged from the tunnel — almost into the astonished arms of two uniformed guards or policemen. I tried to pass with a cheery “Guten Abend”, but one of them seized me, swung me around, and said I was under arrest.

There was a high perpendicular cliff on one side of the track and an exceedingly steep declivity of loose stones or talus on the other. As the policeman released his hold on my arm and began talking excitedly to his companion, I said angrily, in my best German, “I am in a great hurry and have no time to be arrested”, and leaped over the edge of the embankment astride my Alpine stock. Holding the top in both hands and trailing the rest behind me, and paddling with both feet, I slithered down at terrific speed, like a witch on a broomstick, followed by an avalanche of loose stones. Reaching the bottom of the talus slope where the pine forest commenced again, I glanced back and saw the train had stopped and the two policemen were climbing on board. Realizing I was now a fugitive from justice as well as a tunnel “crasher”, I ran down the mountain, cutting across the zigzags of the trail and jumping over logs and boulders. I reached Interlaken well ahead of the train, and sought the sanctuary of my hotel.

Wood was present as a friend at the last successful glider flights made by Otto Lilienthal, which took place only a few days prior to the crash that caused the inventor’s death. I scarcely need to tell you that Wood himself insisted on making a flight in the glider too — and did so successfully. Lilienthal was the first man to navigate the air for any distance without the aid of a balloon. Wood made the last photos ever taken of his flights, and still has the letter Lilienthal wrote on Saturday, August 8, 1896, inviting him to come along next day — which proved to be the ill-fated day on which the glider crashed.

Wood wrote an article for the Boston Transcript on this experience, from which he has prepared the following account.

It was near the end of my two years in Berlin that I made the acquaintance of Otto Lilienthal, whose pioneer work on artificial flight I had followed with interest for years. His early experiments, based on a long study of the flight of birds, had been performed in the outskirts of Berlin, where he had built a small artificial hill, from the top of which he had launched himself supported on wings of bamboo and cotton fabric, gliding off to a landing at some distance from the base of the hill. By this time he had become more ambitious, and practiced his flights on the high rolling hills near Rhinow, some of which were over three hundred feet high and carpeted with long thick grass and spongy moss. Before taking me out to witness his flights, he showed me, in his engine factory in Berlin, a power-driven aeroplane, with twenty-five square yards of wing surface, which was almost completed. On the following Sunday we went by train to Neustadt, some hundred miles north of Berlin, and from there to Rhinow in a peasant’s cart. Storks were flying over the fields all around us, frequently landing close by the roadside, and Lilienthal excitedly explained how they landed, by swinging their long legs out in front just before reaching the ground. This movement threw up the forward edge of their wings and arrested the forward motion. He had learned how to imitate this technique, after many accidents involving sprained ankles and broken bones.

His machine was a “pocket airship”, and was stored on a small cart in the peasant’s barn. We drove over to the mountains, and with the help of the peasant the “glider”, as we should call it now, was put together like a box kite. It was a biplane with wings having arched surfaces, which he had discovered were very superior in lifting power to flat surfaces.

The lower plane measured twenty feet from tip to tip and the upper one, supported on two stout bamboo sticks, was firmly fixed to the lower by tightly stretched guy wires. So perfectly was the machine fitted together that it was impossible to find a single loose wire or brace, and the whole machine “boomed” like a drum when rapped with the knuckles. We carried the machine to the top of the hill, and Lilienthal took his place in the framework, lifting the wings from the ground. He was dressed in flannel shirt and knickerbockers, the knees of which were thickly padded to lessen the shock in case of a too rapid descent, for in such an emergency he had learned to drop instantly to his knees after striking with his feet, thus dividing the collision with the earth into two sections and preventing injury or strain to the machine.

I took my place considerably below him, by my camera, and waited anxiously for the start; he faced the wind and stood like an athlete waiting for the starting pistol. Presently the breeze freshened a little; he took three rapid steps forward and was instantly lifted from the ground, sailing off nearly horizontally from the summit. He went over my head at a terrific pace, at an elevation of about fifty feet, the wind playing wild tunes on the tense cordage of the machine, and was past me before I had time to train the camera on him. Suddenly he swerved to the left, somewhat obliquely to the wind, and then came what may have been a forerunner of the disaster of the next Sunday. It happened so quickly and I was so excited at the moment that I did not grasp exactly what happened, but the apparatus tipped sideways as if a sudden gust had got under the left wing. For a moment I could see the top of the aeroplane, and then with a powerful thrust of his legs he brought the machine once more on an even keel and sailed away below me across the fields at the bottom, kicking at the tops of the haycocks as he passed over them. When within a foot of the ground he threw his legs forward, and notwithstanding its great velocity the machine stopped instantly, its front turning up and allowing the wind to strike under the wings, and he dropped lightly to the earth. I ran after him and found him quite breathless from excitement and exertion. He said, “Did you see that? I thought for a moment it was all up with me. I tipped so, then so, and I threw out my legs thus and righted it. I have learned something new; I learn something new each time”.

Towards the end of the afternoon, after witnessing perhaps half a score of flights and observing carefully how he preserved his equilibrium, I managed to screw up courage enough to try the machine. We carried it a dozen yards or so up the hillside, and I stepped into the frame and lifted the apparatus from the ground. My first feeling was one of utter helplessness. The machine weighed about forty pounds, and the enormous surface spread to the wind, combined with the leverage of the ten-foot wings, made it quite difficult to hold. It rocked and tipped from side to side with every puff of air, and I had to exert my entire strength to keep it level.

Lilienthal cautioned me especially against letting the apparatus dive forward and downward, when the wind strikes the upper surface of the wings — the commonest disaster the novice meets with. The tendency is checked by throwing the legs forward, as in landing, which brings the machine up into the wind and checks its forward motion. As you stand in the frame your elbows are at your sides, the forearms are horizontal, and your hands grasp one of the horizontal cross braces. The weight of the machine rests in the angle of the elbow joints. In the air, when you are supported by the wings, your weight is carried on the vertical upper arms and by pads which come under the shoulders, the legs and lower part of the body swinging free below.

I stood still facing the wind for a few moments, to accustom myself to the feeling of the machine, and then Lilienthal gave the word to advance. I ran slowly against the wind, the weight of the machine lightening with each step, and presently felt the lifting force. The next instant my feet were off the ground; I was sliding down the aerial incline a few feet above the ground. The apparatus tipped from side to side a good deal, but I managed to land safely, much to my satisfaction, and immediately determined to order a machine for myself and learn to fly. The feeling is most delightful and wholly indescribable. The body being supported from above, with no weight or strain on the legs, the feeling is as if gravitation had been annihilated, although the truth of the matter is that one hangs from the machine in a rather awkward and wearying position.

Nor did the Woods let scientific work keep them from participating in the gay life of the American colony in Berlin, along with another young American couple whom they’d met and liked after a chance encounter between the two husbands in the physical laboratory at the university. One day Wood noticed a student engaged in a problem similar to his own. After the formal nods and Guten Tage of an amiable but defensive neutrality, Wood asked in German for a match. “Gewiss”, said the other, and then, “But you’re an American, aren’t you?” The fellow-student was Augustus Trowbridge of New York, who afterwards rode to fame as professor of physics at Princeton. They brought their wives together, and all four became friends with Charles DeKay, then American consul general. There were rounds of receptions, teas, dinners, grand opera, the Winter Garden with its clowns, including Lavater Lee, who clowned in formal evening dress and without make-up.

Young Wood, aided and abetted by Trowbridge, occasionally did a bit of clowning too — usually at the expense of the stolid German police and petty officials. One of Trowbridge’s favorite stories concerning Wood had to do with a fracas on the el. The elevated railroad which girdled Berlin had first-, second-, and third-class carriages. Only princes, millionaires, and fools rode first class. Trowbridge and Wood had green commutation tickets for the second class. One day when the station police were conspicuously on the job and vigilant, Robert bought a yellow third-class ticket, darted through the gate, and, waving it ostentatiously, plunged with Trowbridge into the compartment of a second-class carriage. A policeman was immediately on his heels, entered the compartment, and as the train pulled out began an angry harangue. Wood pretended not to understand German well and by the time they were rolling into the Zoologischer Garten station, the policeman was purple with rage. He seized Wood by the arm and said, “You must get out here”.

Wood said reproachfully, in his worst German, “No, I don’t get out here. I get out at Friedrich-Strasse”.

“Dummkopf!” exploded the guard. “Gleich heraus!”

“Nein! Friedrich-Strasse heraus.” By that time the train was under way again, and when they got off at Friedrich-Strasse, Wood was arrested. He then produced from his pocket the green commutation ticket and pityingly suggested that the policeman must be either color blind or crazy.

Despite all the high jinks, nonsense, and extracurricular activity, Wood had worked hard and well during the two years in Berlin. His independent researches on determining temperature in vacuum tubes brought his first little early blaze of glory and paved the way for future recognition. His paper had been published internationally.

It was now the spring of 1896. Wood planned to return to America, but was in no hurry about it because he was confident he’d be able to get a post to his liking. Among the friends he had made in Berlin was that strange chap known to the magazine and newspaper editors as Josiah Flynt, to his tramp and hobo cronies as “Cigarette”, and to his deploring family as Frank Willard. This talented and celebrated souse — whose fame rested almost as much on his drinking as writing — was none other than the nephew and namesake of Frances Willard, president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union! Well, here was a summer coming on, with no rush to get back to the States, and this brilliant and friendly if ill-assorted pair of wild geese got it into their heads that they’d like to go for a joy ride — on the new Trans-Siberian Railway, then in process of construction.