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

Accustomed, both of them, to all the luxuries, they began their wedding journey (via the hotels at Monterey and Santa Barbara) with a camping trip to the King’s River Canyon, three hundred miles from any railroad, mostly on horseback, carrying no beds but only their blanket rolls and a tent, with a strange roughneck nicknamed the “Dancing Bear” for guide and packman. He was said to be an English fugitive from justice. He was squat and powerful, less than five feet high, with a brown-red beard cut to a blunt point, giving him a bearlike profile. His hands hung nearly to his knees. Reversing Kipling’s crack at Russia, he was the man that walked like a bear. As a lady’s maid, he must have been a marvel. They started from Moore’s Lumber Mills, where they’d obtained the horses and provisions, and went deep into the canyon. They made camp with couches of pine branches and a stove built with stones, lived mostly on bacon, pan bread, and trout from the stream.

Even for his wedding trip, Wood had not overlooked the possibilities of chemical foolishness. One of the chemicals which Remsen’s students had to prepare was fluorescein, that remarkable substance, a speck of which the size of a pinhead dissolved in a barrel of water will cause it to glow in the sunshine with a brilliant emerald-green light. Aviators shot down in the ocean in the present war are using it to create an enormous green spot on the surface of the water, easily seen by rescue planes.

The Yellowstone Park, which he had visited the year before, was to be included in the itinerary, and it occurred to Wood that Old Faithful geyser would be a real spectacle if heavily charged with fluorescein. So he made a pint of the material in the form of a thick dark-brown sirupy mass, tightly corked in a wide-mouthed bottle, enough to make a small lake fluorescent, and stored it in his baggage.

On the way East, after adventures from California to Alaska and back, they made the grand tour of the Yellowstone, and Wood got ready for the geyser with his bottle of fluorescein. Of this episode, he says:

We found Old Faithful too well watched by the guards to accomplish anything there, but I remembered an even better spot, the celebrated Emerald Spring. A big party of tourists with a guide was about to start on foot for it, but I knew the way and we two started ahead of them, and found the great spring deserted. A strong flow of water was coming up from the depths of the funnel, and as soon as we heard the voices of the tourists, I uncorked the bottle of fluorescein and threw it into the center of the pool. Down it went deeper and deeper until it was lost to view, leaving a green trail to mark its path. Nothing happened for a minute or two, and then there rolled up slowly from the depths a great cumulus cloud like a thunderhead of a dazzling green color, which grew larger and more complicated in form as it neared the surface, and by the time the tourists arrived, the whole pool was glowing in the hot sunshine with the brilliance and color of an emerald. We heard the guide intoning monotonously his patter: “This here, ladies and gentlemen, is the Emerald Spring, so called from the greenish color of — my God, I’ve never seen it like this, and I’ve been here ten years!” The tourists were entranced, and so were we.

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