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

If this episode were unique in Wood’s biography, it might have slight significance, but many similar smoking anecdotes are told of him, and where there’s smoke there’s always fire. One of the strongest leit motifs through this man’s whole life has been his curious, not always conscious affinity with flame. It illumines his Promethean-scientific side and is always spilling over in his pranks, both Huck Finnish and Mephistophelian. In the light of the fact that he led the revolt against Madame Curie’s objection to smoking at the Solway Conference in Brussels, had a somewhat similar adventure at the Royal Auto Club in London, etc., etc., one has the right to suspect that when he lights his pipe where he shouldn’t, the bad little boy who loves to play with fire and shock his Aunt Sally is still hiding behind the absent-minded great man and grinning.

When asked to lecture before the Philadelphia Forum, he chose “Flame” as his subject, and turned the dignified stage of the Academy into a cross between a Blitzkrieg and Vesuvius. There were sheets of blaze, acetylene torches, showering white-hot globules of molten steel — huge tubes of blue fire that whistled and shrieked before they exploded. Leopold Stokowski sat in a stage box. He had often conducted on the same stage — but this beat the burning of Moscow in the 1812 Overture… .

When the curtain went down, Wood wiped his brow, pulled out his pipe, and was striking a match, when the fireman backstage called, “Hey, you can’t do that!”

When this Promethean prankster, whom I then scarcely knew, took me for the first time to his big laboratory at Johns Hopkins, he turned his back for a couple of minutes, near a basin, then blandly offered me a handful of fire. It burned like an alcohol flame, but it was not much hotter than a cucumber[14]. I’ve a notion that if I hadn’t accepted it, I mightn’t be writing his biography.

I began trying just now to explain the serious connection between Dr. Robert Williams Wood, the Royal Society, and the gold Rumford medal. If I’ve slid into writing about Wood in Flames, it’s doubtless bad structure — but it’s all part of the same picture.

In the summer of 1939 Wood had turned seventy, and you might imagine that he’d sit down and rest for a couple of minutes, or even lie down and take a nap. Instead, the Woods were off for the West Coast again for experiments with the new type of diffraction gratings at the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff and at the Mount Wilson Observatory at Pasadena.

Arriving in Pasadena, Gertrude went to Hollywood, where her sister was living, and Wood went to the Observatory for experimental trials of some new gratings he’d made. One placed over a three-inch Schmidt camera of five inches focus gave a fully exposed spectrum of Arcturus in five seconds. With an exposure of ten minutes he secured a sharp photograph of the spectrum of the Ring Nebula in Lyra, which was “going some” for a camera of only five inches focus. These experiments set a record for short exposure stellar spectra with a slitless spectrograph. The photographic plate was only half an inch square, but the definition of the spectrum lines was so perfect that on an enlargement of nearly thirty diameters, the lines were less than one-third of a millimeter in width.

This was preliminary to the real spectroscopic feat he’d embarked on, which was to make a diffraction grating large enough to cover the great eighteen-inch Schmidt camera, with a focus of thirty-six inches, the instrument with which Dr. F. Zwicky was discovering super novae at a rate that caused astronomers to gasp.

In the summer of 1941, Wood was throwing boomerangs at his biographer in East Hampton, and casually starting again for California, with gratings for the eighteen-inch camera.

Chapter Twenty.

Wood as a Boomerang Thrower — as Amanuensis to a Thunderbolt — and as an Amateur Infant Psychologist

This triple tale of a curiosity-inflamed Promethean poltergeist begins with lightning and boomerangs, circles properly back to the point of departure as boomerangs should — and then sails off, still boomerang-propelled, into amateur experiments in infant psychology, including a gunpowder plot directed at his own innocent and bored baby granddaughter. Yet the man has kept complaining that I make him out a monster in parts of this narrative…