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

If the letter was not authentic, it was at any rate miraculously prophetic. All his life, he has been arriving “sooner than had been expected.” Concerning some of his greatest scientific achievements, later rediscovered and cashed in on by others, the Scientific American had an article not so long ago entitled “Too Soon is as Bad as Too Late.” His pyrotechnic originality is still continually “taking people by surprise” and he is so hyperkinetic that he never seems to know fatigue. He was seventy in May, 1938, and would normally have been retired as head of the Physics Department at Johns Hopkins University. Instead of his being retired as “Emeritus” he was appointed Research Professor of Physics at the same university, and is going stronger than ever. Last summer, 1940, when I was with the Woods at East Hampton, he had just been awarded the Draper Medal by the National Academy of Science, for work which he has done, since his retirement, in so improving diffraction gratings that they are now replacing prisms in the great star spectrographs of the larger observatories. Current gossip about him in Europe has been that most younger associates who worked with him over there broke down from exhaustion and were obliged to take a rest cure every couple of months while he worked on.

The old adage that the child is father to the man has never had a more astounding confirmation than in the case of Wood. By the age of eight, he had already become a sort of potential triple cross with the characteristics of an infantile Prometheus, a poltergeist, and Crile’s Irish Elk. Put in simpler words, the embryonic scientist was a holy terror. He is to this day. In the midst of my work with him at their East Hampton place last summer, the disturbingly beautiful but even more disturbingly not dumb Marya Mannes, daughter of David Mannes (now Mrs. Richard Blow), who had known the Woods intimately since she was sixteen, said to me, patting one of Wood’s bony, powerful, extraordinary hands affectionately:

“You ought to enjoy this work. It’s right up your alley, isn’t it?”

I said, “What do you mean?”

She said, “Haven’t you generally written about savages, cannibal kings, and wild men?”

I said, “I wouldn’t be the one to write a biography about a tame man. I wouldn’t know how.”

Wood is full of a sort of detached affection and kindliness, but he has no deep respect for and no humility toward anything on earth or in the starry heavens except the laws of nature. He has no fear of man or God, or anything — except perhaps occasionally Mrs. Wood.

It is no mere “legend” but a fact in family history that at the age of eight, Wood gave a lecture on the anatomy of jellyfish, illustrated with magic-lantern slides which he himself had redrawn from the pictures in the scientific treatise by Agassiz. They had given him a magic lantern to play with, with a few colored slides. He had tired of the clowns and angels, and had made his own slides as substitutes. The lecture was given in the dining-room, with some of the neighbors’ children and their mothers present.

Said Gertrude Wood, his tolerant but not always meekly long-suffering wife, as we were discussing this childhood episode, “Thank heaven, that was one lecture I didn’t have to attend.”

A contributing influence to his Gargantuan precosity was the fact that while he was still at the age when children like to play with toys (and was being bored to death in “Mrs. Walker’s Select Day School” for nice little boys and girls of good family, where he stood continually near the bottom of the class), he had been given, to play with, one of the most powerful and dangerous toys that has ever fallen into the hands of any child in the history of the world. It contributed to his subsequent scientific achievements — for it was the immense blower plant and factory of B. F. Sturtevant, at Jamaica Plain, outside of Boston.

When young Robert was about four, the family had moved to Jamaica Plain, then an attractive Boston suburb. He had been born in a quaint old house at Concord, and had been dandled as a baby on Emerson’s knee. The Woods had had culture from earliest Colonial days, and Dr. Wood, Senior, had brought back a considerable fortune from the Hawaiian Islands, where he had pioneered in the cultivation of sugar cane.

Their next door neighbor in Jamaica Plain was Benjamin Franklin Sturtevant, founder of the still existing Sturtevant Blower Works for the manufacture of air blowers for mine shafts and other huge devices for ventilation. The Sturtevants had an only son, Charlie, three or four years older than Rob Wood, and the two little boys immediately became friends. It was this friendship, which grew as both became a little older, that led to Rob’s acquisition of the blower plant as a childhood toy — and the way it happened is a beautiful story of childhood friendship, ending on a note of sadness.

Dr. Wood says: