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

Well, I never quite knew (replied Wood). As a matter of fact I don’t know yet whether he was trying to bribe — or befuddle — me with champagne. But whether crook or crackpot, he was an amusing fellow. He claimed he could reduce the amount of current required for illumination to a fifth of what the bulbs use now. I happened to cross over that summer with the New York capitalist who was planning to sink $20,000 in the experiments, and promised to investigate the phenomenon. I warned him not to disclose my identity but to say merely that I was a Mr. Wood, a friend of his, who was also interested in the invention. About a week after I’d arrived in Paris, there came a phone call inviting me to the inventor’s house and laboratories. His idea was to feed short intermittent pulses of current into the lamps in succession. He used double the voltage for which the lamps were rated, shooting the flashes of current from one lamp to another. He was innocent as a babe of any suspicion I was a physicist. He supposed I was just another American business man who knew all about dollars but nothing about dynamos. He assured me solemnly that light produced from lamps by his method had very peculiar properties resembling those of X rays, as they could penetrate flesh so that you could see the bones! He held one in his clenched fist and tried to make me think I was “seeing the bones”!

Presently he illuminated three lamps arranged on a rotating wheel at the center of the ceiling. Up to then I had listened openmouthed to his fantastic claims, as if bewildered and entranced, but now I asked for a hand mirror which was presently found for me by his assistant. I studied the reflection of the whirling lamps in the mirror and waggled the mirror rapidly to and fro, muttering some gibberish to myself about a “luminous sine-wave curve of variable intensity”.

“Ah” and “ah” again exclaimed the inventor, “Monsieur then comprehends something of the physik?” I was tired of the nonsense, though it had been amusing, so I said, “Yes, I am R. W. Wood of Johns Hopkins University”.

He hesitated for a perceptible second, then leaped on me in ecstasy, shaking my hand in seeming delight. “Oh, but this is for me a very great honor! Wait and you shall see”. Whereupon he darted out of the room, returning in a moment with a copy of my Physical Optics. Then, believe it or not as Ripley says, he turned page after page (of my own book, Lord help us!) with marked paragraphs, and exclaimed, “Here you see the proof! Here and here and here! And now we shall drink to your health… He pushed a bell, gave his instructions, and presently the butler appeared with a bottle of champagne. The circus had been well worth an entire morning lost — but not worth my friend’s $20,000.

* * *

Allen W. Harris of the Baltimore Sun, who was pouring us all another drop of whisky, said, “Maybe he thought if you’d go in cahoots with him, you could raise it to a million”.

SCIENTIFIC DETECTIVE: Wood examines a bomb fragment while Lieutenant Itzel looks on, during the investigation of the Brandy bomb mystery.

CELEBRITIES: Wood, Max Planck and Albert Einstein in the front row of a scientific lecture in Berlin in 1931. It was after this meeting that Wood tested the party guests with the bitter-tasteless powder.

The most fantastic piece of electro-medical hokum ever brought to his attention, says Wood, was the recent “discovery” of a method of sending the curative properties of sulfanilamide over a copper wire to an aluminum plate on which bottles of distilled water were standing. At the end of a half hour the water in each bottle was supposed to become highly charged with the germicidal properties of the drug. This charged water, the inventor claimed, could then be used internally or by intravenous injections… “with results equal to those produced by solution of the sulfanilamide itself in water”. And he claimed that it had made “a favorable impression” on the director of the Chemical Foundation in New York!

The inventor of the discovery was asked to demonstrate it before a committee at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Dr. Perrin Long, who has been largely responsible for putting sulfanilamide on the map, persuaded Wood to help debunk the demonstration.

The inventor in this case was a true “screw ball” who believed he would be a benefactor of mankind. He was not seeking the Foundation’s money. He had plenty of his own.

“It was funny and crazy”, says Wood, “but pathetic”.