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

On removing the block from the press and warming it up to the point at which the ice cylinder began to melt, it was possible to remove the steel piston and shake out the frozen cylinder of ice. The bullet was found at the center where it had originally been placed, thus clearly demonstrating that the ice within the cylinder had at no moment existed as “pressure- molten water”

Wood, though an undergraduate student at Harvard, published these results in the American Journal of Science after communicating them to Shaler. Shaler was crestfallen, yet proud of Wood, and completely convinced by the results of the experiment.

The little boy, now grown to daring youth, had returned for a last time to his gigantic toy and had used it to make his first important contribution to scientific knowledge.

Chapter Two. Four Intransigeant Years

Four Intransigeant Years as a Student at Harvard — Wood Beards His Professors and Dreams a Dream

From the autumn of 1887 until his graduation from Harvard in 1891, young Robert was a difficult problem to most of the faculty with whom he came in contact and conflict. In some studies he was disturbingly brilliant and original; in others he was so indifferent that he narrowly escaped flunking them. It would have been the same in any university. When I asked him how he’d happened to choose Harvard, he said, “Father chose!”

He had entered with the maximum number of conditions. He removed them by taking one or two extra courses each year, but remained a poor student to the end from the viewpoint of those among the academic pundits who discouraged originality — and these were still in the strong majority. By that time, however, Harvard, in response to President Eliot’s advocacy of the elective system, had got away from the hard and fast curriculum which forced every student to take a set variety of subjects, mostly classical. Wood was allowed a considerable choice of subjects. These were largely scientific. He specialized in chemistry and would probably have continued in it throughout his life, with his poltergeist-Promethean penchant for fires and explosions… if the water closet in a certain later — and supposedly select — boarding-house in Leipzig hadn’t opened directly on the dining-room….

While chemistry was his serious concern at Harvard, his hobby was geology, and the great Professor Shaler said one day to his father, “It’s spoiling a good geologist to make a poor chemist.” Despite the glacier episode and other wrangles, Shaler remained his best friend on the faculty. Wood admired him deeply, and my guess is that Shaler had a profound influence in shaping the character — and some of the idiosyncrasies — of the future professor of physics. Shaler was a classroom P. T. Barnum, who delighted in dragging in the cherry-colored cats and elephants. As Wood vividly remembers him, he was a red-bearded, long-legged Kentuckian, noted for what the students called “the geological stride,” which kept classes at a dogtrot as they followed him on expeditions to the rock-bound coast of Massachusetts or to various inland quarries which they visited. Shaler gave the most popular course in college, designated NH-4 in the catalogue. Its popularity lay partly in the legend that it was a “snap,” but there was also an aura about his lecture room which delighted the more intelligent of the students. He was spectacular on occasion to a degree seldom equaled on any stage in the heyday of high vaudeville, and often given to forensic hyperbole. One of Shaler’s fantastic flights so intrigued young Wood that after close to fifty years he can still quote it verbatim. It has never appeared in print, and he begged me to include it.

The geologist had been lecturing one day on the gradual development of life on earth; nature’s provision of terrifying fertility to insure a species against extinction; the necessity of avoiding overcrowding by the introduction of mass massacre of certain lower forms of life, to supplement nature’s own massacres in which species higher up in the evolutionary scale devoured the surplus. Said he by way of peroration:

“The female aphis or common plant louse, gentlemen, produces in a single summer three thousand eggs — gentlemen! — and I have made a calculation that if all the progeny had lived since the first appearance of the Aphididae on earth, we should now have a cylinder of plant lice equaling in diameter that of the earth’s orbit around the sun, and projecting itself into space with a velocity greater than that of light!”