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

1

A separate book might be written about the father, who if he were still alive would not be taking this aspersion lying down. He was born April 22, 1803, and had been twice around the Horn before 1840. This was in the days when “Died in Pernambuco” occurred on the tombstones of bodies which had been brought home to Nantucket, New Bedford, and Boston. The South Pacific was a suburb of New England towns whose railed cupolas looked out over the sea. This grand old scholar and adventurer, worthy sire of a great, fantastic son, was born in Stowe, Maine, son of Joseph Wood and Betsy Williams; graduated from Waterville College (now Colby University) 1829, and from Bowdoin College Medical School 1832. Sailed from Boston for Hawaiian Islands October, 1838, arrived April, 1839 (around the Horn). By appointment of the American Consul was for ten years in charge of the American Hospital for Seamen in Honolulu. For twenty years subsequently was engaged in the growing and manufacture of sugar, a pioneer and the first financially successful one, in the introduction of this industry into the Hawaiian Islands. He retired from the Islands in 1866 and retired from all business in 1879. Married (June 4, 1833) Delia Morse, daughter of Samuel A. Morse, for many years Collector of Customs at Machias and subsequently of Eastport, Maine. Second marriage was to Lucy Jane Davis (October 31, 1864), daughter of Charles B. Davis of Concord, Massachusetts. They lived in Honolulu for two years, then a year in Europe. Robert, Junior, was born May 2, 1868, in the Davis home in Concord. They lived in Concord for four years in the Davis home, as Grandmother Davis was a bedridden invalid. After her death, they moved to Jamaica Plain, a suburb of Boston. In 1868, year of Wood, Junior’s, birth, Dr. Wood, Senior, again sailed for Honolulu. His ostensible purpose was to collect biological material for Louis Agassiz, of which he brought back plenty before the year was out — but it amuses me to imagine that he may have been fleeing from the “lusty lungs” of his Gargantuan son. Those lungs still contain a lot of noble wind about the father. I wanted to hold the father in a footnote, and am still trying to, but here’s what Wood added—and there’s still more to come. While Wood, Senior, was in charge of the American Hospital for Seamen at Honolulu, a Russian warship anchored and the admiral came ashore. The admiral was entertained frequently by Dr. Wood. On the night of their last dinner, they exchanged keepsakes — a little gift from Dr. Wood to the admiral, and a little gift from the admiral to Dr. Wood. Next morning Wood received with the admiral’s compliments a valuable book which he’d chanced to admire on the flagship. These Woods are well bred, but tough. Wood tore from the wall and boxed up an oil painting which was worth five times as much as the book — and which the admiral had chanced to admire. Wood had his servant deliver it to a petty officer with instructions that it was not to be given the admiral until the ship had cleared port. The ship duly cleared —but put about and dropped anchor off Diamond Head. A cutter came ashore and a box was handed to the harbor master, addressed to Dr. Wood. It contained a cup of solid platinum, worth many times its weight in gold. The warship had meanwhile weighed anchor and disappeared. The father of Wood, perhaps for the only time in his life, was licked. Here comes the last of his father, and if it doesn’t give you goose flesh, it’s because I can’t write. Wood, Senior, lay sick abed in 1892, at the age of ninety. Old age was his only illness. But old age had laid its hand upon him. After a number of days, he arose on his pillow and said in a loud, strong voice, "I want to give up the ghost!” He lay back and died of old age with a terrible if unconventional dignity which gives to think of Captain Ahab and the Whale.

2

In his notes there kept occurring a story about how when he was 13 years old, his father had taken him in to Boston and bought him for $100 or more, a high-wheeled, man-sized Columbia bicycle. He kept putting it in, and I kept leaving it out. His final plea for its inclusion didn’t impress me. Here’s what he wrote.

“The only excuse for the Columbia bicycle was to illustrate a trait which I inherited from my father, whose reaction in matters of expenditures resulted from a mixture of New England thrift and Hawaiian lavishness. I was conditioned in my youth against extravagance in spending pennies, but have formed no fixation against spending dollars, whether I possess them at the moment or not. Gertrude says I always take a day coach for short trips alone, but engage a drawing-room on The Chief when we go to California. ”

He hasn’t been generally too insistent about what goes in or what comes out, but he was plaintive about the bicycle. It was as if I had taken it away from him. I began finally to understand that this bicycle was very important to him—but couldn’t understand why, since his economic explanations had left me cold, when it belatedly dawned on me that the reason is because he’s still riding it—and will to the day of his death. If after his death he approaches the Pearly Gates, it will be on that bicycle. And he will expect and be given the special welcome he deserves.

“Here comes somebody on a high horse—or high wheel—instead of a kindly but dumb and perhaps foot-weary nobody. ”

This begins to illuminate the combination of always well-bred arrogance, not always so well-bred egocentric impudence and impishness, combined strangely with sweetness and light, which makes this man unique.

3

Principles of Psychology, by William James. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

4

He subsequently wrote a long and flattering screed paying tribute to the wonders of the Russian Fair, etc., only to receive from the Examiner a printed rejection slip, with the notation that they hadn’t returned the manuscript because he’d failed to enclose return postage. This cleared his conscience and ended his career—as an international newspaper correspondent.

5

Wood is frequently introduced to laymen by his scientific colleagues as “the grandfather of Mickey Mouse,” and a curious thing happened only last year (1940) in connection with Mickey Mouse’s Woodian ancestry. The AP carried a story that a professor at Wellesley had “applied the art and technique of Walt Disney” to the projection of animated mathematical drawings and curves. Mickey Mouse technique had completed the circle—beginning as a scientific abstract, and returning via Disney’s famous comics to its source.

6

Bradford Wood died at the age of two and was buried in the family plot in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Mass.

7

This was the starting point of some of his most important investigations in what Wood termed “resonance spectra,” for which the theoretical physicists could not even suggest a plausible explanation. With the advent of the Bohr theory of energy levels in atoms and molecules, their explanation was at once evident, and as Wood had foreseen, their study was of the utmost importance in connection with the newer theory of band spectra.

8

See Chapter Ten.

9

It was designed for work in the remote infrared region of the spectrum. These were coarse gratings having from 800 to 4,800 lines to the inch ruled with deep saw-tooth grooves in copper. Gratings for work with visible light have from 15,000 to 30,000 lines to the inch ruled on a harder metal, speculum, or aluminum on glass. He carried on a short research with Trowbridge at Princeton in which they examined the behavior and performance of the grating, incidentally resolving the carbon dioxide band at 4.3 μ into a double band, which had never been done before. They did not realize the importance of this discovery at the time, and their paper was overlooked by Bjerrum, whose theory of molecular band spectra published in 1912 predicted a double band in the infrared as a result of a vibration in the molecule combined with its rotation. The double band was rediscovered in 1913 by Eva von Bahr, to whom credit has always been given for proving experimentally the theory of Bjerrum. The band had been pictured and described in the Philosophical Magazine three years before. Bjerrum’s oversight was probably due to the tide of the paper: “Note on Infra-red Investigations with Echelette Gratings.”

10

Later on, using the same apparatus but employing a mercury arc lamp instead of the Welsbach, Rubens and Von Bayer isolated a radiation having a wave length of 0.3 of a millimeter.

11

In addition to his medals and awards, Wood has the degree of LL.D. from Clark University, University of Birmingham, England, and Edinburgh University; Ph.D., University of Berlin; is foreign member Royal Society, London; honorary member London Optical Society; corresponding member Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Gottingen; foreign member Accademia dei Lincei, Rome; Russian Academy of Science, Leningrad; member American National Academy of Science, Academy of Arts and Sciences, Philosophical Society, Physical Society; honorary member Royal Institution, London; honorary fellow London Physical Society; foreign member Royal Swedish Academy, Stockholm; foreign member Indian Association for Science, Calcutta.

12

Among the notable medals for outstanding scientific achievement of which Dr. Wood is the recipient are the following: 1899: medal awarded by the Royal Society of Arts for his diffraction process in color photography; 1907: the Franklin Institute John Scott medal, awarded by the City of Philadelphia for further progress in diffraction color photos; 1909: gold and silver Rumford medals awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for research on the optical properties of metallic vapors; 1910: the J. Traill Taylor medal, awarded for photography by invisible rays; 1918: gold medal, awarded by the Società Italians della Scienze, for general outstanding scientific achievement; 1933: the Frederick Ives medal, awarded by the Optical Society of America for distinguished work in physical optics; 1938: the gold and silver Rumford medals, awarded by the Royal Society, London, for his daring and genius in experimentation; 1940: the Draper gold medal, awarded by the National Academy of Science, Washington, for contributions to astrophysics and spectroscopy.

13

I managed to dig up, however, an article entitled “Americans and the Royal Society from 1783 to 1937,” written by Heathcote Heindel and published in Science, March 25, 1938, which threw more light on the general subject. Only six American physicists have ever been elected to foreign membership in the Society: 1889: Henry A. Rowland of Johns Hopkins; 1895: Samuel P. Langley of the Smithsonian Institution; 1897: J. Willard Gibbs of Yale; 1902: Albert Abraham Michelson of Chicago; 1919: Robert Williams Wood of Johns Hopkins; 1935: Irving Langmuir of the General Electric Co.

14

Cotton waste wet with a mixture of two parts of carbon tetrachloride and one part of carbon bisulphide.

15

As I Remember Him: The Biography of R. S., by Hans Zinsser. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.