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

Despite all this brilliant extracurricular activity, the boy continued a dullard in the classrooms of William Nichols’s Classical School in Boston! In this day of advanced specialization in education, the stupidity of his preceptors seems more shocking than it actually was then. A boy like Wood would be encouraged today to go into his natural field by all intelligent prep- school professors who knew him. But the “classic” tradition was still completely hidebound in New England, with the result that as he approached eighteen, and the Harvard entrance examinations, he faced almost certain failure. Here, for the first time, he began to take the direction of his studies into his own hands in spite of the violent opposition of Headmaster Nichols. The boy’s only real interest and bent were towards science. It might be said in extenuation of Mr. Nichols’s prejudices that they were almost universal in the Boston of that day. M. I. T. was a long generation in the future for the likes of Robert Wood. A gentleman’s son was supposed to stick to the classics. Against the opposition and definite orders of the headmaster, Wood bought secondhand books on physics and botany, not because the latter interested him much, but because it could help him pass the Harvard examinations. When the smoke blew away after the entrance examinations in the spring of 1887, he found himself admitted to the freshman class, though he had failed ignominiously in Latin and Greek — purely and simply because he had crammed himself brilliantly with science. Up to then he had treated chemistry, physics, astronomy, and biology as amusements and play, rather than work — but he had built a magnificent practical foundation.

To what extent the “gigantic toy” (the Sturtevant Blower Plant) entered into that foundation is shown by the fact that after he entered Harvard, he streaked back to the Sturtevant plant one day, and with the aid of its mighty machinery, succeeded in exploding the “water-lubricated” glacier theory which the great geologist, Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, was teaching at the time. Shaler was brilliant, popular, and internationally famous in his field, but young Wood, who took nothing on faith, had many run-ins with him. One of their arguments culminated in a conviction on Wood’s part that Shaler was entirely wrong in his pet theory that the mysterious absence of glacial erosion in wide areas of North America was due to the fact that certain glaciers had been of such terrific weight that the pressure had melted the ice at their bottom and given them a sort of liquid cushion to slide on. This was known as the “pressure-molten water glacial theory.” Shaler insisted that in the non-eroded regions the ice in contact with the ground had been liquefied by the pressure above it, in consequence of which there was an absence of any force to drag the pebbles and boulders along the surface of the underlying rock ledges.

Wood totally disbelieved this. He thought he saw a means of disproving it. Harvard, of course, had no apparatus sufficiently powerful for the experiment he wanted to conduct, so he went back to his old friend Sturtevant and to the blower plant. Sturtevant was greatly amused and interested. He gave Wood carte blanche to try anything he pleased.

A large block of cast iron was prepared and bored with an accurately cylindrical hole about two inches in diameter and eight inches in depth. A steel cylinder was accurately turned on a lathe and exactly fitted in the hole in the block to serve as a piston for applying pressure to the ice. The hole was half filled with water, placed outdoors in the freezing weather, and frozen solid. A lead bullet was then placed on the surface of the ice at the center of the hole and the hole was nearly filled with additional water, which was allowed to freeze. The steel cylinder was then inserted and pushed down against the ice, after which it was subjected to a pressure of many tons to the inch, under the mighty ram of the hydraulic press. It was much greater than the greatest pressure that Shaler had imagined in the case of the glacier, equaling the pressure of a body of ice two miles thick.

Under this enormous pressure, paper-thin sheets of ice were squeezed out around the piston, and in some cases needlelike jets of ice spurted up from the surface of the block, the ice having forced its way through imperfections in the casting. This escape did not, however, release the pressure, the continued application of which was indicated by the gauge on the press.