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

In the autumn of 1891, after his graduation from Harvard, he went to Johns Hopkins with the idea of taking a Ph. D. in chemistry, working principally with Professor Ira Remsen. The first thing he did was to find a boarding-house to live in — and the next thing he did was to set the hash on fire. There had long been in that college boarding-house an up — to — then unverifiable suspicion that the breakfast hash was made from scraps scraped from the boarders’ dinner plates the night before. It was a plausible suspicion because morning hash always followed on the heels of steak the night before. But how to prove it? Wood scratched his ear and said, “I think I can prove it… with a Bunsen burner and a spectroscope.” He knew that lithium chloride was a harmless substance which happened to resemble common salt, both in appearance and taste. He knew also that the spectroscope was capable of detecting the minutest traces of lithium in any material burned in a blue flame. Thus treated, it would show a crimson line. So the fiendish plot was hatched against the landlady, and when next they dined on beefsteak, Rob left some large and tempting scraps on his plate, liberally sprinkled with lithium chloride. Fragments of next morning’s hash were pocketed, carried to the laboratory, and cremated before the slit of the spectroscope. The telltale crimson lithium line appeared, faint but unmistakable. The story followed Wood throughout his whole career, and now has a number of international variants. One piece of embroidery places the episode in a German pension to which a distinguished American professor of chemistry was refused admission — because Wood and his lithium had been there first.

The fire-spitting episode occurred one day after a January thaw, as Wood was on his way back from the laboratory to that same boarding-house. The shortest route for the students was through a Negro section which had a grocery store where colored crowds collected every day at noon to sun themselves on the sidewalk. The street just then was flooded with water from curb to curb. Wood had learned that sodium, a soft, silvery metal, when thrown into water, will take fire spontaneously with a loud explosion and burn with a fierce, baleful yellow flame, emitting showers of sparks and clouds of white smoke. The next time he and his fellow-boarders were starting home for lunch, he carried in his pocket, in a small tin box, a ball of sodium about the size of a large marble. The big puddle spread in the street, and the Negroes were assembled as usual, sitting on boxes and old chairs in front of the grocery store. As Wood passed, he cleared his throat loudly and spat ostentatiously into the puddle, at the same time flipping the sodium ball, unnoticed, in the same direction. There was a terrific bang as they strode on, sparks flew, and a great flash of yellow fire blazed on the surface of the water. Behind them pandemonium broke loose — howls, prayers, overturned chairs, and one voice louder than all the rest:

“Out o’ my way, niggers! Dat man spit dat fire! He look young — but only de ole Devil, ole Satan hisself, can do dat!” Wood says this was his first successful “experiment” with the element which afterward, through experiments of a soberer nature, contributed to his world-wide fame.

A. B. Porter, a graduate student in physics, with whom he had formed a partnership in the perpetration of harmless diversions, collaborated with him in the construction of a giant megaphone, a cone of stiff cardboard nine feet long and about two feet in diameter at the larger end. (Megaphones of this type, only much smaller, were not offered for sale to the general public until four or five years later). With this they could project speech to an astonishing distance, addressing embarrassing remarks to people two or three blocks away. With a horn of this description one can speak without raising the voice, and the person addressed gets the impression that the speaker is very close to him. Being thus quite safe from detection, they would sit in Wood’s room on the top floor of the boardinghouse on McCulloh Street and watch for a promising victim. Once they caught sight of a roundsman twirling his night stick and talking to a girl under a corner gas lamp two blocks up the street. Resting the mouth of the great horn on the window sill and pointing it towards the philandering officer, they reminded him in a gentle voice that “All policemen have big feet.” To a person walking away from them at the end of the block, with no one else in sight, they would say, “I beg your pardon, but you’ve dropped something.” He would stop, look behind him, then down at his feet, then up at the windows above, and after meditating for a moment, move along.