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

Wood made the metallic crystals when Remsen’s back was turned, and they were so pretty he put them away like lightning bugs, in a bottle. The curious aftermath came forty years later. A New York doctor claimed to have discovered a mysterious new substance which would prevent sunburn if mixed with a face cream, and had offered it, demanding huge royalties, to the president of a well-known manufacturing company. The latter, with Scotch canniness, unwilling to buy a pig in a poke, and reluctant for that matter to pay for the pig at all if he could help it, managed to obtain a sample and submitted it for analysis to Dr. Wood — who had long since become Professor of Experimental Physics in charge of research in the same sacred halls where Remsen had scolded him. Wood was extremely skeptical that a New York doctor had invented any new chemical substance, despite the fact that members of the Chemistry Department who had volunteered to make an analysis of it for him had failed to identify it after several days and had given up the job.

Wood, meanwhile, had been trying it with the spectroscope. The sample was in liquid form, of a light amber color. Photographing its absorption spectrum with ultraviolet light, he had discovered — somewhat to his surprise — that it did indeed eliminate the harmful rays from sunlight. From his knowledge of absorption spectra, his first guess was that it must be a solution of salicylic acid. From his knowledge of chemistry, he knew that if his guess was right, the solution would turn blue when treated with ferric chloride. He tried this — and found his guess was wrong. The mysterious solution remained the same color as before. On the following morning, however, lo and behold, the watch glass on which the test had been made was covered with a crystallized layer of long black needles which shone with a brilliant metallic luster!

“Now where,” said Dr. Wood to himself, “have I seen those before?” And since he has the memory of the proverbial Hindu elephant — “Where indeed but in that little bottle put away long years ago when I was but a pup!”

The crystals were the same old quinhydrone, and, quod erat demonstrandum, the pig in a poke was no new chemical substance, but the same old hydroquinone used by every photographer — unmasked by what it had done when dosed with ferric chloride.

“So that’s what it is,” Wood told the cosmetic magnate. “You can buy all you want of it cheaply at any drug supply house — and it does just what that doctor said it would — but if you mix it with any of your skin creams or beach lotions, God help the gals who use it! ”

“Why?” said the cold-cream king.

“Because,” said Wood, “it’s a skin irritant, and photographers use rubber gloves when they mess about with it.”

That ended it for the big manufacturer, but later on the New York doctor’s “discovery” was promoted by a “beauty specialist,” and all the women at a certain seaside resort broke out with a frightful skin rash, after which the discovery and discoverer disappeared into oblivion.

In January, 1892, Robert’s father died. After due reflection Robert decided to cut short his studies at Johns Hopkins and get married that coming April. In the meantime he had been playing hooky more and more from chemistry, running over continually to Rowland’s laboratory in the physics building, and had “bothered Rowland almost to death” trying out all sorts of extracurricular things there. He wanted to spend part of the wedding trip in Alaska, and went over one day to ask Rowland, who had been up there, some questions about Alaskan travel — and incidentally to say good-by and thank him.

Rowland was a gruff great man, laconic.

“What d’you want to find out about Alaska for?”

“Well,” Wood said, shifting from one foot to the other, “I’m leaving for California next week to get married, and I want to include Alaska in our wedding trip…

“Huh,” said Rowland with a snort, “tried everything else. Going to try that now, are you?”

So Robert Williams Wood, no longer Junior, was married to Gertrude Ames on the nineteenth of April, 1892, in San Francisco. He was twenty-four, six feet tall, square-jawed, blue-eyed, dominant, handsome as Lucifer. She was younger, slender, lovely, above the medium in height, with an abundance of honey-colored hair. It was an indissoluble marriage.