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

This followed another bomb murder, the assassination in 1932 of a well-to-do spinster. She was killed by a bomb attached to the muffler of the Buick car which she always drove herself. The retarded explosion occurred one day after she’d started the car, as usual, in her own garage, and had driven about two miles. It became vital, during the police investigation, to know definitely whether the explosive had, or had not, been dynamite. Their own experts were stumped, and Wood was again called in. With no usual clues to go on, he conceived the bright if startling idea of blowing up some more old Buicks.

“We located an ‘auto cemetery,’” he says, “got a lot of dynamite and other explosives, and spent the afternoon blowing up all the old Buicks we could find, to the delight of crowds of little boys attracted from miles around by the noise”.

Study and analysis of the debris proved with absolute certainty that the explosive in the bomb murder could not have been dynamite, but had been something entirely different — which was what they were after.

This “method”, which nobody had ever thought of before, was outlined by Dr. Wood in his lecture at Edgar Hoover’s school attended by police from all over the country. Soon the California police were using it successfully, and now it is a regular part of bomb-squad technique in dealing with similar cases.

Tragic and grimly fantastic was the mysterious death from an explosion in 1935 of Miss Emily Briscoe, daughter of a prominent Baltimore family — a case whose solution Dr. Wood later presented to the British Royal Society, of which he is a member, in a paper entitled “Optical and Physical Effects of High Explosives”.

One winter Sunday afternoon in the Briscoe home, when the servants were off, the house became a little chilly, and Miss Briscoe went down to the furnace and opened its door to see if the fire was burning properly. The family heard a “bang” like a muffled pistol shot and then Miss Briscoe exclaiming, “Why, something stung me!”

When they rushed down, she was standing before the open door of the furnace, bewildered, clutching at her breast, and repeating:

“It was like a sharp sting. Something must have struck me — here”.

When they opened her dress, there was a tiny red mark, such as might have been made by the point of an ice pick. They were puzzled, were going to put iodine on it and phone the doctor. To their horror and amazement, the girl collapsed, and in less than three minutes was dead. There was no blood — just a tiny red puncture.

An autopsy by the city physician showed that a large artery had been cut, and that internal tissues had been torn to a considerable degree. Yet no projectile, no “bullet”, no fragment of metal could be found. Finally an X-ray examination revealed a minute opaque object lower down in the body. Dissection disclosed a tiny, queer-shaped metal pellet, the size and shape of a grape seed, surrounded by a thin metal skirt. No one had ever seen anything like it before.

It was sent to the city chemist. On the insistence of the influential family of the dead girl, backed up by the demands of the newspapers, Dr. Wood was called into the case. He tells the story.

When I went down to the city laboratory, the chemist was surrounded by a group of reporters, to whom he was exhibiting the mysterious tiny fragment of metal, held in the palm of his hand. As I came in he said to the reporters, “I shall have no statement to make until I have analyzed this metal, and found out what it is. I shall then make my report to the coroner, after which it may be released to the newspapers. Until then I have nothing to say”.

I knew the chemist very well, so I had no hesitation in being a little familiar with him. “It’s obviously copper. There’s nothing to be gained by analyzing it, which will destroy it and then we can’t identify it. Let me have it, and I’ll see if I can find out where it came from”.

“What do you think it is?” asked the chemist.

“I think it is part of a detonator or dynamite cap which got into the furnace by mistake with the coal. It was probably lying on top of the coal, and when the furnace door was opened the flames came up through the unconsumed coal and ignited the detonator”.

The reporters were all ears, of course, and I was captured and taken aside. “How can you find out about that?” they asked.

“Well”, I suggested, “if you have a car here we will go out to a quarry and get some detonators and fire them”.