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

1914: Dr. Wood was recommended for the British Society’s gold Rumford medal by Sir Joseph Larmor, but nothing came of it.

1919: Dr. Wood was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society.

1924: Dr. Wood was recommended again for the Royal Society’s Rumford medal by Merton, and nothing came of it.

1938: Dr. Wood finally got the gold Rumford medal.

The Royal Society and the Rumford medal require a bit of further explaining to the American lay audience. Both go back for centuries. The Society was incorporated in 1662, and is the oldest in the world, with the exception of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. Sir Isaac Newton was elected a fellow in 1672, and wrote to the secretary, “I shall endeavour to show my gratitude by communicating what my poor and solitary endeavours can effect… “. A succession of great names occurs in the Society’s annals through the centuries, and around 1790 or 1800 that of Count Rumford blossoms. He was a celebrated colonial British-American scientist, and he founded the award in double, to be given in America by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in England by the Royal Society. A curious final tangling fact is that Count Rumford himself was the first recipient of his own medal in England!

Wood is no help at all in explaining why it was now given to him. On subjects of this sort he becomes impatient. He has stuck all his medals in an old dresser drawer behind his wife’s shopping lists[12]. Some of them, including the gold ones, are about the size, to exaggerate a little, of the toasted buttercakes you get in Childs. The only thing I ever found worth quoting from his notes concerning the Rumford medals was this[13]:

“You get, in each instance, a silver replica of the gold one, presumably in case you wish to cash in on your winnings in your impoverished old age. The Royal Society gold one weighs 15 1/2 ounces”.

Sir William Bragg’s speech in presenting the medal to Wood is the best summary of his achievement, and I quote, from it:

Professor Robert Williams Wood is awarded the Rumford medal. The study of physical optics owes much to Professor Wood, who has been one of the leading experimenters in this field for the past forty years. There is hardly a branch of the subject which he has not enriched by the touch of his genius.

Before the advent of Bohr’s quantum theory, when our knowledge of the structure of atoms and molecules was very meagre, he had discovered the line and continuous absorption of sodium vapor, the phenomenon of resonance radiation of gases and vapors, and the quenching of this radiation by foreign gases. These discoveries opened up rich fields of research and were of the greatest value to later workers in laying the foundations of the theory of atomic and molecular spectra.

The elucidation of the phenomenon of resonance radiation demanded the utmost experimental skill and resource. Nothing less powerful than an improvised 40 ft. focus spectrograph sufficed for his work on the remarkable resonance spectra of molecules! Even now one cannot but admire the beautiful and ingenious experiments on the independent excitation of the yellow sodium lines.

In addition to his researches on the resonance radiation of metallic and other vapours, Wood investigated their magnetic rotation and dispersion. His work on the magneto-optics of sodium vapor both in the atomic and the molecular state is now classical.

More recent but belonging to the same domain of experiment are the very interesting discoveries of Wood and Ellett on the magneto- optics of resonance radiation.

Wood’s mastery of technique is universally acknowledged. He has introduced many ingenious and striking devices to experimental method. These are too numerous to catalogue here, but I would mention specially his method of the production of atomic hydrogen and his observations of the spontaneous incandescence of substances in atomic hydrogen which led to the invention of the atomic hydrogen welding torch by Langmuir; his very efficient and now widely used method of observing Raman Spectra; his echelette grating which has proved to be the grating par excellence for the investigation of the near and far infra-red; and his pioneer use of light filters in ultra-violet and infra-red photography.

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If you ask Wood himself why he got the medal, he is quite likely to tell you it was because he introduced smoking in the hitherto forbidden precincts of the Royal Society’s sacred halls! One day, long ago, tea and cakes were being served in the majestic anteroom, when Wood became absorbed in talk with Sir William Crookes and lit his pipe. A flunkey in knee breeches and braided coat appeared as if by magic and whispered, with a mixture of awe and horror:

“Very sorry, sir, but smoking is not allowed”.

Wood says he was so engrossed with Crookes that he went on smoking. Crookes stared, hastily produced a cigarette, and lighted it. In another minute, others lighted up — and the Royal Society has smoked there ever since.