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

The tragic exposure eventually led to Blondlot’s madness and death. He was a great man, utterly sincere, who had “gone off the deep end”, perhaps through some form of self-hypnotism or overstimulated retinal imagination due to years of staring in the dark. What Wood had done, reluctantly but with scientific ruthlessness, had been the coup de grace.

This climax was summarized by A. A. Campbell Swinton, F.R.S., in the Westminster Gazette:

… the highest scientific tribunal in France had made its award and all apparently went well till an American Professor of Physics — R. W. Wood, of Baltimore, now a foreign member of the Royal Society of London — exploded completely and forever the whole discovery by showing to Blondlot that he continued to see the spectrum, when no spectrum could possibly exist there, if indeed there ever had been one!

Toward outright scientific frauds and fakers, Wood is scornful and merciless, never feeling any sadness or depression over their exposure, but rather a savage and amused elation. One night in Baltimore, after a dinner, he told me and a couple of friends a number of his adventures in this field.

Some years ago, I was asked by Mr. Bernard Baker, president of the Atlantic Transport Line and trustee of the university, to come down to his office and look into the apparatus of a man whose experiments he was financing. It was a scheme for transmitting speech and signals under water. The man claimed he’d discovered a new chemical which was sensitive to sound. Mr. Baker had given him a large room in his office building to use as a laboratory, and I was taken there. He had a large table covered with a hodgepodge of pseudoscientific instruments. There was a dome-shaped bell with eight small pendulums hanging around it, touching its rim. Several parts of a typewriter were included in the setup! The whole thing, on the face of it, was perfectly preposterous, a collection of junk connected by wires. The inventor said his chemical was so sensitive to sound that it was decomposed by noises which the human ear could not possibly hear. I asked him how he could make it, if it was so sensitive, and he said he had to prepare it undersea, in a diving bell! I advised Mr. Baker to kick the man out of his office — which he did a day or two later.

On another occasion I was taken to the roof of a downtown office building to see a demonstration by an inventor who claimed he’d found a method of getting power out of the atmosphere. His table was covered with electric motors, a small toy railroad with an electric locomotive, and other little gadgets run by electricity. At one end of the table a pole ran up in the air, with fifteen or twenty brass points radiating from it. These, he said, gathered the power from the atmosphere, which came down the wire and operated the toys and gadgets on the table. There was a crowd of newspaper reporters and one or two men from whom he was trying to get money. There were several boxes under the table, partly covered by burlap, and one box which was completely covered. Nobody had paid any attention to this part of the “exhibit”, and I pulled the burlap from the box that was completely covered, disclosing a big storage battery with two wires leading up to the top of the table, along the inside of one of the legs! He cleared out of the hotel without paying his bill, carrying all of his apparatus with him.

“They used to tar and feather ’em when they came like that out West”, interpolated Leslie Hohman, the psychiatrist. “There’s a difference between the deluded crank and the deliberate faker. In which class, by the way, was that Paris inventor who did monkey tricks with electric light bulbs, and got into the semiscientific journals for a while? He was going to revolutionize all our lighting systems, as I recall”.