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 Six. Campus Wizard

When Robert Wood obtained in 1897 the academically humble and poorly paid post of junior instructor in physics at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, he was a young man just turning his twenty-ninth year, married, with two children — a third, Elizabeth, soon to be born — and he was completely ignorant of the highly special branch of physics destined to bring him his later greatest glory. But while he knew next to nothing yet of physical optics, he was already a daring experimenter in the general field, and began almost immediately to revolutionize undergraduate classroom technique at Madison.

It all began gaily with a series of lecture circuses, staged for the edification and joy of the students, climaxing soon in mirages and tornadoes. The idea that he, as well as Nature’s God, could create these phenomena had come to him the previous summer in San Francisco, when he’d noticed one day a beautiful mirage on the city sidewalk at the top of a hill, where one could look along a long stretch of sun-heated pavement with a sky background behind it. The pavement appeared to be flooded with water in which the inverted reflection of pedestrians was clearly visible. Wood had stationed his two small children at the end of the pavement and photographed the result. Today this type of mirage is observed constantly by motorists on pavements or streets, but at that time it had only been reported as occurring on wide expanses of hot sand in the desert. To create his miniature phantasmic oases and actual whirling sandstorms he procured four flat sheets of iron, each about four feet long and eight inches wide. These he laid end to end, supported on iron stands, making a long, narrow, level vista, which he sprinkled thickly with sand. At the further end he mounted a mirror which, when viewed from the opposite end, showed the reflected image of the sky- backed window. A row of miniature mountains and some palm trees, cut out of paper and arranged on the sand in front of the mirror, represented the horizon of his desert landscape, which was warmed from below by a row of small gas burners under the iron plates instead of from above by the sun. Would it work on this small scale? He lit the burners and commenced observations. The mountains and palm trees were clearly silhouetted against the bright sky, but presently a small pool of brilliantly shining water appeared in front of them at the base of the mountains. If the eyes were raised an inch or two above the level of the sand, the lake vanished, only to reappear as soon as the viewpoint was depressed, just as does a real mirage if we ascend a small hillock. And now the pool increased in size and the reflected images of the mountains appeared, and “if the eye was lowered a trifle more, the mountain chain disappeared completely in the illusory lake, which had now become an inundation”. Needless to state, the students were enchanted — almost to the point of howling with joy — and from then on the new “prof” was ace-high.

Wood next regaled them with his tornadoes. The atmospheric conditions (a layer of hot air close to the ground, with cooler air above) which exist with mirages also give rise to the “dust whirls” so often seen on American deserts and, on a larger scale, to tornadoes. One of the metal plates (cleared of sand) was sprinkled with precipitated silica powder and heated by a few burners. In a few minutes beautiful little whirlwinds began to run about over the surface, spinning the light powder up in funnel-shaped vortices, which lasted sometimes ten or fifteen seconds. By sprinkling a large square plate of sheet iron with sal ammoniac and heating it strongly by Bunsen burners, white fumes were given off, and presently, at the center of the plate, there mounted to a height of six or eight feet a most perfect miniature tornado of white smoke!

A little later in the year he invented a new form of pseudoscope. When viewed through this instrument, an old-fashioned washbowl appeared as a white dome, and when a marble was dropped into it, it seemed to roll up and down over the surface of the dome in defiance of the law of gravitation, finally stopping on the summit!

Another memorable lecture-room stunt was his demonstration of the curved flight of baseballs as pitched by the then Dizzy Deans — leading on to the parabolic orbits of planets and comets as pitched by the Lord God Almighty. The limited space in the lecture room had raised difficulties. If the curve was to be made at all apparent in that limited space, the ball would have to be exceedingly light and the axial rotation very rapid. Wood found the ordinary oak ball or oak apple suitable for this purpose. A ping-pong ball might have been even better. A strip of rubber band six or eight inches long and one- eighth inch wide was wound under tension around the ball, two or three turns being enough, and the ball catapulted forward by means of the remainder of the band. A total deflection of forty-five degrees was easily obtained, and when pitching the “rise” (in which case the free part of the band is below) the ball, starting in horizontal flight, would often ascend half way to the ceiling. Try it for yourself, if you don’t believe it.

An experiment followed showing in miniature the elliptical and parabolic orbits of the planets and comets around the sun. The conical pole piece of a vertical electro-magnet was covered with a large sheet of plate glass, and a steel bicycle ball projected toward a point a little to one side of the magnet, which represented the sun. The ball whirled around in a beautiful ellipse with the sun at one focus, as Wood demonstrated with a glass plate covered with a thin film of soot, obtained by holding it over a smoking flame. In this case the ball left a record of its path on the film.

The publication of a scientific paper on this experiment led Wood into his first brief polemic. An older professor of physics in one of London’s universities criticized the paper in a letter to the London Nature, saying that the experiment did not illustrate Newtonian orbits, as the magnetic attraction varied as the inverse fifth power and not as the inverse square as in the case of gravitation. This was young Wood’s first slap — but he sat down and drew a diagram of his experiment with the lines of magnetic force put down and realized at once that the ball was not coming in along the lines of force, but was cutting across them at an angle, and that it was the horizontal component only that governed the orbit. He set one of his young students to measure the effective force in the plane of the glass plate, and it turned out to be very nearly proportional to the inverse square. In the meantime, letters of criticism had appeared in several other English technical journals, and Wood joyfully sent off a rejoinder giving the results of the actual measurements.

These must have been great days for the students at Madison, while Wood’s introduction of excitement, dramatics, and circus technique was beginning to attract world-wide attention both to him and the university. He had been from earliest childhood, and still is today, a circus man, a showman — just as were Archimedes, Galileo, and Copernicus. He is full of childish vanity, God knows, and dearly loves the limelight and applause — but the excitement is more in the thing shown than in himself, so that while he sometimes seems to be an egotist and exhibitionist, he is not actually one in the unpleasant connotation of the words. This distinction was keenly sensed by Professor Benjamin Snow, then head of the Department of Physics at Madison. A new young instructor, or assistant professor as he presently became, was and still is small potatoes in any major university, and if Wood had not been encouraged by this important ally higher up in the faculty — if there’d been an academic stuffed shirt at the head of the department — he could scarcely have obtained the necessary cooperation. Luckily, Snow himself was a dynamic, enthusiastic lecturer and fond of spectacular stunts. The fun Snow and his young instructor had together is recorded in Wood’s notes.

He made me his assistant in the course on general physics for the sophomores. My duties at first were those of the uniformed darky who passes things to the conjurer as required. He was never satisfied with any piece of apparatus that was not the largest in the world, and I made a hit at once by constructing an enormous box for making smoke rings a foot in diameter, similar to the one I had made for my lecture in Chicago, when I was a student in chemistry. A dynamic smoke ring that would knock a large pasteboard box at the further end of the lecture table onto the floor delighted him beyond measure. It was also a new idea to him that smoke was not necessary for the formation of the ring, at all events it had never occurred to him that an invisible ring of air knocking things about was the more spectacular demonstration. Interested for the moment in these whirling vortices, I fussed around and concocted a number of new experiments with the rings, which were described and illustrated with photographs again, this time in the London Nature, including a method of making a ring one half pure air and the other half charged with smoke, so that it left the tube from which it was blown in the form of a U.

This can be done with a pasteboard mailing tube an inch or so in diameter by blowing dense smoke very gently along the bottom of the tube, held horizontally, so that the smoke flows along the bottom of the tube to the other end; then a gentle puff is given, and the half ring emerges. Another device made it possible to form a fat air ring, like a doughnut, with a white thread of smoke as a core, spinning with terrific velocity. This illustrated the very high velocity of rotation along the core of the vortex ring, or on the axis of a tornado. Illustrating the difference between force and work, the latter being defined as a force moving against a resistance through a finite distance, Snow was in the habit of leaning against the end of the lecture table and pushing against it with all his might. “I push, and I push, and I PUSH!”… Getting red in the face, perspiration breaking out on his brow… “There is no motion, I push and push, and I don’t do a particle of work!”… almost collapsing from his herculean efforts.

In one of his lectures I caught him in a slight mistake and being unfamiliar with the rule that “little assistants should be seen but not heard” called his attention to it at the close of the lecture.

His subject was gravitation, and he reminded the class of Jules Verne’s story of a journey to the moon, saying that the author never made a mistake or violated any laws of physics in his fiction.

“You will remember”, he said, “that when the projectile crossed the center of gravity between the earth and the moon, the passengers inside weighed nothing, but floated about without any support, and that, gentlemen, is just what would happen”.

At the end of the lecture, while some of the students were hanging around asking questions and inspecting the apparatus, I ventured the remark that in that particular case Jules Verne had certainly made a mistake; the passengers would float about as soon as the projectile was out of the earth’s atmosphere, for gravitational effects are not felt inside a freely falling or freely rising container. “I think we can prove it by experiment, by putting a half dollar on this book and tossing it up before the window. I think that daylight will be visible between the coin and book throughout its flight”, which was exactly what happened after two or three trials. This convinced Snow that Jules Verne was wrong, in this instance at least.

All these classroom discoveries and demonstrations were of interest, perhaps, only to students and scientists — but our young instructor soon followed them up with a “practical” invention which immediately obtained for the university a gift from the state of $200,000 and saves the world each winter millions of dollars in losses by fires resulting from the crude methods employed by plumbers. It was the now universally known Electric Thaw.

Since my own knowledge of what to do when my pipes freeze underground is confined to a number in the Rhinebeck Village telephone book which brings “Cart” Sipperley humming out with a service wagon full of precisely the gadgets Wood adapted forty years ago in Madison, and since all I understand about those coiled, imposing gadgets is that they unfreeze my pipes without the need of tearing up my floors and driveways, I’ve persuaded our Promethean Wood to dictate his own version of how he invented the Electric Thaw, and how it does the thawing. “You can brag a little, if you want to”, I told him, and he said with a hurt expression, “You know I never brag”.

The unprecedented cold (he dictated) throughout the whole Northwest in the winter of 1899 froze the ground in Madison down to a depth of eight feet and more. Half the service pipes in Madison were frozen and there was some fear that the mains had ceased functioning. Bonfires were burning on various premises where the plumbers were digging down to get at the service pipes. Our own pipe was frozen, and we had paid a local plumber twenty dollars for thawing it.

I was walking down Langdon Street to the laboratory one morning and passed a group of plumbers who were pushing into the frozen pipe a rubber tube attached to the spout of a portable boiler in an effort to thaw the pipe with steam. They were having trouble because they couldn’t make the tube turn a corner.

I continued on my way to the laboratory, thinking the situation over, and it came into my mind that a heavy current of electricity passed through a metal conductor raises the temperature of the metal, and that moreover an electric current would follow the conductor around any number of turns. Could not this be the solution of the whole trouble — by merely joining the faucet in the house to one wire of an electric generator and carrying the other wire to a faucet in a neighboring house?

On reaching the laboratory I went at once to the office of Professor Jackson, the head of the Department of Electrical Engineering, and suggested this plan to him. He objected to it on the ground that the current would be carried by the earth rather than by the pipes. But when I pointed out that the ground was frozen and that ice was a nonconductor, he agreed to join me in making the experiment.

That same afternoon we had the electric light company bring a transformer on a wagon to the home of Senator Vilas, Chairman of the Board of Regents of the university. Plumbers had been at work for a week in and around his house trying to find a three-hundred-foot service pipe which joined the house with the street main, no record of its position being available. The lawn was covered with what looked like numerous newly made graves and fires burning at other spots to soften the ground.

The linesman who came with the wagon climbed a pole and brought down wire leads from the overhead line supplying the electric light. These were attached to the secondary coil of the transformer, while the wires from the primary were joined to the faucet in the cellar and the street hydrant three hundred feet distant respectively. A large tub of salt water with two copper plates was placed in the circuit to govern the strength of the current.

The current was turned on, and we waited at the open faucet in the cellar. At the end of ten minutes, we heard a gurgling sound and presently a jet of muddy water mixed with ice and rust particles spurted from the faucet into the sink. Loud cheers from the Senator’s family greeted this eruption, and a few minutes later, the butler appeared with champagne glasses, et cetera.

The Madison Democrat the next morning contained a two- column article describing this successful solution of the water famine, and it was relayed by the Associated Press all over the country.

Ever since that time, the electric method has been the standard method over the whole world — one of the large scale developments in recent years being the thawing of a twelve-inch main under the Hudson River, frozen at the two ends where the pipes came near the surface of the ground.

This discovery came at an opportune time for the university. The state legislature was then in session, and President Adams had asked for an appropriation of two hundred thousand dollars to build an engineering laboratory. Serious opposition had been offered by the legislators, who asked what the university had ever done for the state. This was satisfactorily answered by referring to the recent gift to the people of the thawing invention and the method of relieving recurrent water famines. Thereupon the legislature promptly and enthusiastically granted the request.

The trustees of the university rewarded this gift to the people by changing my title from that of instructor to assistant professor.

The reader will agree, I think, that in this case the professor could have bragged a little if he felt like it. My own guess is that in addition to the inventive genius involved, he showed the cagey practical wisdom of the fox in choosing the Senator’s pipes for the initial demonstration! Maybe he knew and maybe he didn’t that Senator Vilas was a key man on that appropriation committee. As for the plumbers of the world, instead of being disgruntled, as some newspapers had predicted, they were enchanted. They all now use the Electric Thaw, the wide world over.

Young Wood’s next extracurricular contribution to excitement and revolution on and outside the campus involved no inventive genius. In the autumn of 1899 he brought out as a bright new toy from Boston an early model of the Stanley Steamer — the first automobile ever seen in the state of Wisconsin. And he soon set the state on its ear by scorching around at the terrific speed of twenty miles an hour. It arrived just before Thanksgiving Day, and one of the first things Rob did was to invite President Adams, the venerable, white-bearded head of the university, for a joy ride.

“I took him out”, says Wood, still chuckling after these long forty years, “to the Thanksgiving football game. The field was surrounded by a dirt track where horse races were held. We careened furiously around the track, with the brass band blaring, students cheering, and old President Adams’s white hair and beard flying in the wind”.

And then — believe it or not — Wood and Professor Joseph Jastrow drove all the way to Milwaukee! It was eighty miles through ruts and sand and dirt, and the gasket of the steam chest blew out. Wood cut out a new one from the rubber tread on the car’s step. They got there and came back — literally under their own steam. This, of course, was front-page stuff. The Madison Democrat carried the news that “two scientists” had “demonstrated the practicability of automobiles for ordinary country roads”, and that “there was scarcely any inconvenience or danger from the frightening of horses and pedestrians along the way”.

However, the column entitled “Vox Populi” in that same journal raised an almost immediate yowl of protest. Wood and his Stanley Steamer were making a hell of a sensation. It was one of the first good cars ever made — but it was a steam engine. It made the noises and emitted the smoke and steam and occasional flames peculiar to steam engines and Chinese dragons. Also frequent loud explosions when the fuel was turned on, vaporized in hot tubes, and passed to the burners, which were ignited at the side with a match. Whenever there was a transverse wind of considerable force, sheets of blue fire were blown out at the side of the car, and small boys shouted, “Hey, Mister, your thing’s on fire!” But what was worse for timorous souls who never dreamed of owning one was that this hell buggy whizzed over the roughest roads at “a dangerous and appalling speed”. So Rob was openly denounced as a “scorcher”, in a letter to the editors by a dear old lady who signed herself “Carroll Street”. She wrote:

I may be over-nervous in my advancing years, and magnify unduly modern dangers; but I do dread our fast bicycle riders, and now that we have an automobile I hope I shall be excused for experiencing some dread of that too. It is not on my own account, however, that I entertain fear, but for my grandchildren whose thoughtless play often takes them into the street. The automobile goes like a “scorcher” — at 20 miles an hour I should judge — too fast certainly for public safety on our thronged streets. Scorching is under ban. Now I suggest that an ordinance be passed forbidding automobiles to exceed a 6-mile speed within the city limits. There will be more of these machines among us soon, I have no doubt, and the question of regulation should be settled at once. Such action, I am told, has been taken in all other places where automobiles are run. The new vehicle gives tone to the town, and I am not too old to like that. I even want to see others come, but let’s have the ordinance before any damage is done.

After Dr. Wood had found this letter, buried in his jumble of old yellow clippings, I said, “Well, I guess — except of course for your serious scientific work begun at Madison, which we haven’t touched yet — this about cleans up the high lights of the Wisconsin period”.

He said, “Yes… but I’ve forgotten to tell you I’m now a senator out there..”.

“What kind of a senator?”

“I’m a Roman senator, toga, gold band, and everything..”.

“How come?”

“Well”, said he, “it happened years later, after I’d gone to Johns Hopkins and bought this place here at East Hampton. You know Albert Herter has had a studio and summer house here for years. He came over one day and asked if I’d pose for him. I told him it depended on what kind of a pose. He told me it was for a mural in the Statehouse at Madison, Wisconsin, and that he wanted me to be a Roman senator. So I posed in a toga with a gold band around my head. The likeness was perfect even to the lock of black hair that formerly hung down over one side of my forehead, a strange coiffure for a Roman senator. I later saw the mural, covering one whole wall of the Appellate Court. The senators are seated in a semicircle, with me at the end in front receiving the Roman general, with his aides, carrying the spoils of war. One of the present members of the Department of Physics told me they always took visiting physicists to see it as a ‘horrible example’ of what happened to brash young instructors”.