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

ROBERT W. WOOD

Foreword

Concerning American Small Boys and American Giants

American small boys love to invent and make things — gadgets, smells, kites, explosions, slingshots, little engines, and bean shooters. They also love to play outrageous pranks.

The essence of Robert Williams Wood is that he is a super endowed American small boy — who has never grown up. The same was true of Mark Twain both as a person and as projected in the personalities of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. The part played by environment in the development of these two American small boys (one living and one dead) who stand and will continue to stand as giants in their totally different fields runs curiously parallel. Both were supplied by fate, to test their wits and strength in early childhood, with mighty and gigantic “toys”.

In Mark Twain’s case, it was the rolling Mississippi with its rafts, floods, and steamboats, runaway slaves, robbers’ caves… you know…

In Robert Wood’s case, it was the roaring, giant Sturtevant Blower Works with its power plant, hydraulic rams, chemical vats, blast furnaces, engines, tools, and machinery, which you shall presently see.

I know Robert Wood pretty well by now, having worked and played with him for a long time, and I hope I can succeed in showing him to you as he really is. There is something fantastic, Gargantuan, Promethean about the man, but to this very day, with Wood in his early, active, robust seventies, there lurks grinning and leaps out continually from behind that fiery curtain of fantasy and scientific genius, the American small boy’s dream of himself — the American small boy who has become a great man yet has never grown up.

I keep repeating American because this Wood of mine is as American as a hickory tree. America is in the roots of him. The brightest little French or Greek boy wouldn’t have the remotest idea what he’s all about — any more than they can really understand Huck Finn. And he’s often shocked his little British cousins, though they’ve showered him with all their highest honors. No little land, indeed no other land on earth, could have produced this man.

William Seabrook

Rhinebeck, 1941

Chapter One. Playing With Fire

Small Boy with a Gigantic Toy — Wood Starts Early at Playing with Fire — and Ice

There is a family legend that Robert Williams Wood wrote a letter to his grandmother on the day he was born. The letter in question is extant. I have read, handled, and examined it. It is dated Concord, May 2, 1868. Its obsolete paper, faded, rusty ink, et cetera, all prove the authenticity — at least — of its date. It reads:

My very dear, very good

Grandmama Wood,

Mother is not able to write today — and she therefore desires me to announce to you my arrival this morning — which was about two weeks sooner than had been expected by my friends. So that I had the satisfaction of taking them all by surprise. I had not a very long journey, although what seemed to me a rather rough one, of thirty-six hours.

I did not, however, on my arrival find myself at all fatigued, but on the contrary in most excellent health and spirits.

“What strong lungs he has got,” say my friends, “and what bright blue eyes.”

In due course of time I shall call to pay my respects to you in person, should we both live. Mother directs me to send her love to you, and to subscribe myself.

Your affectionate Grandson,

Rob’t Williams Wood, Jr.

To Mrs. Elizabeth Wood,

Augusta, Maine

This is the one and only legend concerning this great, fantastic physicist, among a thousand now world-famous in scientific circles, which he categorically denies. He confesses to Promethean pranks, conflagrations, and explosions in his early childhood, to courting his fiancée vocally across the continent with wax phonograph cylinders mailed in baking-powder cans; confesses to the cat in the spectroscope, the trained seals he persuaded the British government to use in tracking submarines; confesses even to “purloining” the purple-gold sequins from Tutankhamen’s tomb, via the Cairo Museum — but denies that he wrote the above letter.

He said to me last summer, “I have never subjected it to my ultraviolet light tests now in general use on dubious manuscripts, but I am convinced that the signature is not mine. As a matter of fact, from certain internal evidence, I believe that the entire letter constitutes a forgery committed by my father”.[1]