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

Now that Berlin belatedly had capped his LL.D.’s with a fine new Herr Doktor’s Ph.D., “made in Germany”, our hero was duly grateful, but didn’t take it oversolemnly. At the lecture and subsequent banquet given in his honor when the Woods visited Berlin that summer, he couldn’t resist trotting out the magic, humanity-dividing powder he’d been playing tricks with in America and in England, where he and Mrs. Wood had stopped the week before.

I quote from Wood’s notes concerning what happened when they reached Germany.

I gave an illustrated lecture on some results I’d obtained with some new types of spectra I’d discovered, and the serious part of the visit was over. At the end of the banquet, which was an evening affair attended by professors and wives, an amusing speech was made by von Laue, discoverer of the method of photographing crystal structure by means of X rays. He said a Ph.D. (honoris causa) from Berlin University was a rare honor, requiring the unanimous vote of the entire faculty, and that so far as he knew no physicist had received it before. As some members had never heard of the proposed recipient a copy of his book on How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers had been passed around at the meeting, and this had made the vote unanimous.

I made a halting reply in bad German, in which I tried to tell the story of a Japanese professor who “wished very much to buy very many copies of very funny book to send to very many friends in Japan”, and was able to sit down under cover of laughter. Gertrude didn’t think I’d made a sufficiently grateful acknowledgment, and made a pretty speech of her own, expressing our gratitude and the pleasure we’d experienced in renewing old friendships — all in better German than I had been able to grind out.

During my short talk I happened to mention that I’d brought over a sample of a newly discovered chemical (a derivative of sulpho-urea) that was absolutely without taste to about 40 per cent of humanity, while to the remainder it was as bitter as quinine, and that any who cared to sample it could be accommodated. Later on, when I produced the little pillbox filled with the flourlike white powder, I was surrounded by a crowd of German Herr Professors and their Fraus, holding moistened, outstretched fingers, and all crying:

“Bitte, bitte” (Please, please).

Then came a terrific general argument and uproar.

“No, it tastes not at all!”

“But yes! You have no taste!”

“It is terribly bitter!”

They almost came to blows over it.

* * *

In 1935 Wood was elected president of the American Physical Society, and was obliged to attend again the Pacific Coast annual meeting, which was in Pasadena. He chose high explosives as the subject of his presidential address and enlivened it with stories of cases he’d solved for the police.

As he was descending an elevator after the annual dinner, one of the members came up to him and said,

“Dr. Wood, will you forgive me if I ask a rather impertinent question? You seem in a good mood, and I’d like to risk it”.

“Shoot”, said Wood.

“Are you a Christian Scientist?”

“No”, Wood replied. “What put that in your head?”

All he could answer was that he’d heard it somewhere.

It was only later, when Wood told his wife about it, that she remembered Margaret’s attempt, as a little girl, to uphold the family honor. She had confided to her mother one day that the neighbor’s little girl had said, “We are Episcopalians. What are you?”

“And what did you say?” Gertrude asked.

“I said we were Christian Scientists”, Margaret answered. “You see, I knew papa was a scientist, and I supposed we were Christians”.