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

While I was a student at the University of Berlin, back in 1896, I chanced to be thumbing a bound volume of the Annalen der Physik, published some twenty years previously. By accident I ran across an article on the flight of the boomerang. It was largely a mathematical treatment by some long-dead Herr Doktor who had probably never thrown a boomerang in his life — and maybe had never seen a real one. It was filled with aerodynamical equations that I didn’t understand. But there were diagrams of the different paths of flight the boomerang could take, circles, figure eights, etc., that fascinated me. There was a footnote stating that “boomerangs were obtainable” at a certain toyshop in Berlin, at a cost of one mark fifty each. I hunted up the address and found that after all those years the shop was still operating. But the young salesman had never heard of boomerangs. I insisted, and finally an old patriarch was summoned who shook his head solemnly, scratched it, and then said slowly, “Ja, ja, warten Sie einen Augenblick. Na — ich erinnere mich” (Yes, yes, wait a minute. Now I remember).

Calling for a stepladder, he climbed to a shelf about ten feet from the floor, tossed a lot of stuff aside, dug out a large parcel wrapped in brown paper, which shed clouds of dust as it came down, and disclosed half a dozen small wooden boomerangs, toys really, of rather light weight. I bought them all, such as they were, hurried home, and repaired immediately to a large open lot behind our apartment in Charlottenburg.

After false starts with all sorts of wrong holds and deliveries, I finally began to make them come back a little, and eventually learned to throw them. I brought some of the boomerangs back to America, and one of the duties imposed on me as instructor of physics at the University of Wisconsin was to give every autumn a boomerang demonstration to the undergraduate class in physics which numbered some three hundred. It was their favorite “lecture” of the year, and always attracted large crowds of gapers from other departments and from the town.

A few years later while on a lecturing visit to England, I became acquainted with Professor Walker, the mathematical physicist at Cambridge, and it turned out to my joy that he too was a boomerang enthusiast. From him I learned to make and throw real boomerangs, made of ash, quite heavy, and with which orbits of much greater diameter could be obtained. These were real weapons, similar to those used in Borneo and the Malay Peninsula. Careful shaping of the surfaces was necessary, giving to the implement, in a slight degree, the properties of a screw propeller. In this way the rapid rotational energy was utilized in supporting the implement when in horizontal flight. I was introduced also to the “war boomerang”, a still heavier implement with the arms bent only at a small angle. This was not intended to return, but flew along a few feet above the ground for a much greater distance than it was possible to throw a war club or spear. It is my guess that the “returning boomerang” is perhaps used by primitives only for hunting aquatic birds in flight. If thrown through a thick flock, flying above the water close to shore, it would return to the shore if it missed. It would need to be retrieved, together with the bird, only when a hit was made.

Any heavy boomerang in flight (continued Wood), especially the “returning” ones, can be dangerous. Some time after I’d known him in England, Professor Walker was giving an exhibition with his boomerangs, in Washington, D. C., before a group of scientists. Distracted for a moment by the crowd of bystanders while one of his returning weapons was in flight, he was struck just below the kneecap and was in the hospital for several weeks. My Berlin boomerangs had been toys. In America I ordered from a bent-furniture factory a dozen boomerang “blanks”, made under my instructions by bending an ash plank three inches thick through a right angle and sawing it lengthwise into sections. These I shaped with a drawknife at East Hampton, and gradually learned to duplicate the performances of my British colleague.

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