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

During this year of hell-raising at Hopkins, Wood was conducting a transcontinental correspondence, viva voce, with the girl who later had the courage and audacity to take him on for life. He did this by means of wax phonograph cylinders which they mailed to and fro in old Royal baking-powder cans. He had rented two Edison recording mechanisms (you couldn’t buy them in those days) and had taught her to operate one of them. She lived in San Francisco. A priest lived in the room next to his in the boarding-house in Baltimore, and the walls between the rooms were thin. He used to cover his head and the machine with quilts to muffle the ardent words destined solely for the ears of his inamorata.

He had first met Miss Gertrude Ames when he was a sophomore at Harvard. She was a girl out of the Golden West, but of pure New England stock like his own. She had lived in California since her early childhood, but she was born in Boston, daughter of Pelham W. Ames, who was a grandson of Fisher Ames, first Congressman from Massachusetts during Washington’s administration. Her maternal grandmother was a sister of Wood’s father, so that she was a cousin, once removed. She had come East that winter to visit relatives in Boston and Cambridge. It was her first experience with snow and sub-zero weather. Robert took her tobogganing and sleigh riding. He began his courtship with a bottle of sulphuric acid! “The Courtship of a Coming Chemist” would be a happy title for the episode if it weren’t for his absurd antipathy for the Miles Standish word. Here’s what I found among his own notes covering that period.

Her hands got cold (on the sleigh ride), and I said, “How would a hot water bottle go?” “Fine,” she said, “but where do we get it?” “I make it,” I replied, pulling a quart wine bottle three-quarters full of cold water from under the seat. Also a bottle of sulphuric acid from which I poured some of the sirupy-looking liquid into the water. In ten seconds the bottle was so hot you could hardly handle it. As soon as it cooled down I added more acid, and when it reached the point at which the acid failed to raise the temperature I produced another bottle containing sticks of fused sodium hydroxide and added these a few at a time. In this way the bottle was kept almost boiling hot throughout our ride.

* * *

At the end of his junior year he had spent the summer vacation visiting the Ames family among the giant redwoods at their summer home in Ross Valley. Next winter Gertrude had come East again, this time to visit relatives in New York. Robert took the first train down from Cambridge, and when he returned to Harvard they were pledged for life. Following his graduation he was off to California again for the summer. He had wanted to get married immediately “but father had said no.” He entered Johns Hopkins University in the fall, and the wax-cylinder exchange was their way of bridging vocally the gap that separated them temporarily by the width of the whole continent.

In the intervals between the time devoted to this unique correspondence and the conducting of casual chemical deviltries, Robert managed to do a good deal of work under Remsen, and also frequently dropped in at Professor Henry Rowland’s laboratory to do odd experiments in spectroscopy and other things more closely related to physics than to chemistry.

Remsen used to reprove him for jumping over the traces, but one such digression, dictated at the time by sheer curiosity, was of real consequence many years later. He’d been working under Remsen in Organic Preparations. One day the task was the preparation of hydroquinone, following the routine formula and directions given in the textbook. (Its white crystals are the substance chiefly used for developing photographic plates.) For some reason he doesn’t now remember, he sought further information in Beilstein’s great treatise on Organic Chemistry and was intrigued by the statement that hydroquinone, when oxidized by ferric chloride, yielded something known as quinhydrone, which crystallized “in long, black needles, having a brilliant metallic luster.” While this promised no explosions, it promised at any rate a pleasing transformation which Robert’s curiosity craved to see. While he was at work on it, Remsen came by, looked at his crystallization dish, and said, “Well, what are you doing now?”.

“I’m making quinhydrone out of the hydroquinone”.

“Well,” snapped the great chemist, who, God knows, had followed plenty of divergent lines in his own time, some of which led up blind alleys and others to fame and glory, “you’re wasting your time; it would be much better to stick to the prescribed course until you learn the elements of organic chemistry. ”