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

They decided to go ahead with the case without Wood, and the trial was slated for a certain date in New York. Some weeks later it was dropped.

Another queer case in which he confounded the conventional experts occurred in Baltimore in 1938. With a set of childish miniature tenpins, he knocked the stuffings out of a lawsuit which had been brought against the Pennsylvania Railroad by some twenty householders who claimed that the rumbling vibration caused by passing freight trains was demolishing their walls, ceilings, and plaster.

Their houses lay along a street in South Baltimore down which a railroad track ran on which several trains passed daily. Heavy trucks also passed along the street, but the suit was brought against the railroad. The claims were so fantastic that the railroad knew they couldn’t be true, yet was in a quandary how to disprove them before a jury. A saloon keeper was going to testify that the bottles fell off his shelves when freight trains went by; another family would testify that windowpanes were shattered and plaster knocked off the walls; and one man actually testified at the trial that his wife had been thrown out of bed one night when a train passed.

The railroad at great expense had brought seismographs and seismograph experts, including one man whose specialty was making records of vibrations caused by quarry blastings. The seismograph recordings proved, of course, that the lawsuit was phony, but were so technical that the railroad realized they wouldn’t be much use for the jury. So, just as the police and federal government had done in many similar criminal cases, the railroad called in Dr. Wood.

Wood scratched his head, said, “Give me a couple of days”, and turned up the second day with a set of tiny wooden tenpins, all of the same size but standing on bases of different diameters, decreasing from 1/4 inch to that of the most sensitive tenpin, which stood on a base only 1/32 of an inch in diameter.

The railroad executives looked at the toys and said, “Are you kidding us?”

Wood set up his toys on a table and said, “Now tap on the table”.

Nothing happened. He said, “Tap a little harder”. The tenpin with the tiniest base promptly fell over.

Wood said, “Now hit the table as hard as you can with your fist”.

The three next smallest tenpins fell over.

Said Wood, “If you kick the table a little or hit it with a hammer they’ll all fall over”. One of the big executives said, “My God, I believe you’ve got it!”

So with the tenpins in their pockets and a long strip of plate glass to serve as a foundation, Wood went down to the district, accompanied by the claim agent and the lawyers. They went from door to door, but no householder would let them in. They’d been warned by their own lawyers.

They finally found an honest old lady who was persuaded to let them in. She even let them go up to the third story where vibration would be at its maximum. Says Wood, with a grin:

I set the plate glass on the window sill, leveling it with a spirit level, and balanced the row of tenpins. Presently a heavy beer truck rolled by, on our side of the street, and the pin with the tiniest base swayed to and fro a bit, threatened to fall, but regained its balance. Presently the big afternoon freight train came puffing and rolling along. The tiniest pin didn’t even tremble. Presently one of the old lady’s grandsons came tearing up the stairs to look at the toys. When he burst into the room to see what was going on, the tenpin with the smallest base upset.

Here was something any jury could not only understand but enjoy, and when the case came to trial and the tenpins were set up in court, not only was it thrown out, but some of the jurors burst out laughing and had to be reprimanded by the smiling judge.

* * *

Last summer when he chanced to take me into the littered storeroom of his big laboratory at Johns Hopkins I spied a scarlet-purple feminine dressing gown or wrapper, draped dramatically over a recumbent telescope. I thought he’d put it there as a joke, and asked him whether he kept a harem. Its presence and history, however, were anything but funny. A Baltimore lady wearing an identical wrapper had been burned to death when the wrapper had been ignited, perhaps by a carelessly tossed match. The material went under a trade name and seemed to be a kind of chenille. Fire spreads over it almost in a flash. A lawsuit was pending in which Wood had been asked to investigate the danger of such textiles.

Chapter Nineteen.

Wood Turns a White Girl Black — Continues His Mighty Labors — Travels and Collects His Medals