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

When I went out, on Mrs. Wood’s gracious invitation, to their summer place at East Hampton last June for a few days’ quiet rest from work on this biography, I found myself chasing all day long in the fields surrounding the farmstead, at the heels of this unextinguishable Crile Elk who never gets tired of anything, at an age when most learned professors are occasionally fain to sit down or take naps. Our main expeditions were across the road into a big field spotted with daisies, where he threw the boomerang and tried to teach me to do it. Previously he had led me to a clover field beyond the bam laboratory, where he had taken his celebrated “autograph of a thunderbolt”.

The thunderbolt’s “signature”, which still hangs in the barn, and which was reproduced with photographs and an article some years ago in the Scientific American, was obtained by Dr. Wood just after it had nearly killed him. Said he, showing me the spot:

“A heavy storm had passed, and the sky was blue overhead. I started across this small field which separated our house from that of my sister-in-law. I had gone about a dozen yards along the path in the grass when my daughter Margaret called to me. I stopped for perhaps ten seconds, and just as I started off again a brilliant blue line of fire came down from the sky with a report like that of a twelve-inch gun, striking the path about twenty feet in front of me and sending up an enormous white cloud of steam. I walked on to see what record the flash had left. There was a withered patch of clover about six inches across, with a hole in the center half an inch in diameter. If Margaret hadn’t called and stopped me, I’d have been ‘on the spot.’ I went back to the laboratory, melted about eight pounds of solder, and poured it into the hole”.

What he had dug out after it hardened looks like a slightly bent, oversized dog whip, cast in metal, heavy as dog whips are at the handle, and tapering gradually to a point. It is slightly over three feet long. My own surprise was that it hadn’t penetrated the earth more deeply.

When we’d returned to the house for tea, I noticed a boomerang reposing on the mantel in the living room. It was a large one — no toy. It was what I suppose a bushman would call a business boomerang. It was made of hardwood, polished, smooth.

“Did it come from Borneo?” I asked.

“I made it myself”, replied Wood. “I’ve made a lot of them”. He took me across into the big daisy field, and for the first time I was watching an expert throw the boomerang. The stance, form, and follow-through seemed more complicated than those in golf, tennis, discus-throwing, or anything I knew. The stance of the discus-thrower in Roman sculpture is closest to the stance Wood took — right foot well forward, shoulders bent to the left, the boomerang held far to the left and backward, with the arm curved behind the waist. Then forward on the left foot, with the boomerang coming up, vertical, high above the right shoulder. As the final step or leap forward is made with the right foot, the boomerang is thrown overhand and perpendicularly — and a little downward, almost as if toward the ground. Instead of striking the ground, it turns over on its side, when properly thrown, and then begins to soar upward in a sweeping curve. When well thrown, it completes the curve and returns to the thrower’s feet. The sport is not without danger. Experts have been in hospitals with broken kneecaps and other injuries.

Dr. Wood encouraged me to try. I managed after repeated trials to make the boomerang rise once. But not in a good flight. Boomerang-throwing requires as much form, practice, and skill as top-notch tennis or golf.

That evening I said to Wood: “You are supposed never to have shown much interest in games or sports. How did you happen to take up boomerangs?”

He said: “It touches aerodynamics, of course, and I suppose my first interest was technical… scientific. But it soon occurred to me that the best way to learn about them would be to throw them myself”.

He loves to talk, and this is what he told me.