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

Since marriage had increased his expenses and responsibilities, and since he was a practical New Englander despite his fantasies, the young man began looking around for some not too costly way of continuing his studies. The then newly formed University of Chicago suggested itself to his mind. It was being publicized as the most lavish academic set-up of all time. Rumor had it that the catalogue weighed fourteen pounds, and that it contained reference to three courses in chemistry — all devoted to compounds which didn’t even exist! So Wood applied for a job, and got it in the autumn of 1892, after what I would call his honeymoon. (He detests the word. His notes which covered that happy period are entitled “Travel Subsequent to Marriage”.) He had asked to become an assistant in chemistry and was appointed honorary fellow in chemistry. It was really a job as “bottle washer for Stokes”, he says — and the honor carried with it no honorarium. All it did was to give him free access to the laboratory. I want to quote at not too great a length from his notes covering the next couple of years, though there’s scarcely any mention in them of the laboratory, or of the university either for that matter. I quote because I think they throw, between the lines, additional light on his character. I have never known exactly what the phrase “practical joke” means, but I do know that a lot of practical jokers deserve to be killed with an ax. Now Robert Williams Wood, from early childhood and today in his honored maturity, plays pranks which are sometimes appalling. But there is a curious mingling of deviltry and kindness in the man which has kept him not only admired but loved by most of his butts and victims. I’m told, not by him, that their old Irish maid Sarah, for instance, viewed him as a benevolent if eccentric demigod. Here are a couple of pages lifted from his own notes on Sarah.

We took a “flat,” as it was called in those days, in an apartment building on the South Side. The Chemistry Department was housed temporarily in a new and very unpretentious apartment house, the rear windows of which commanded a fine view of the rising buildings of the World’s Columbian Exposition. We were just opposite the great Ferris wheel, and watched its growth from birth.

Gertrude was lucky in her choice of a maid of all work, a tall gaunt Irish girl of some forty summers who was a splendid cook, but eccentric. Sarah was innocent as a child of ten and faithful as an old plantation darky. I had bought a tricky apparatus designed to gull the gullible. It was called “The Magic Money-Maker.” A long strip of black cambric was wound up on two parallel rollers, one of which could be turned by a crank, winding up the cloth from its neighbor. You loaded up one side with new five-dollar bills and by feeding strips of white paper in succession between the rollers, out came the bills. It was a perfect optical illusion. I showed it to Sarah, who viewed it with open eyes. Later she came to me holding out an old dollar bill that had been torn in halves and asked hopefully, “Wud the machine mend it?”

“Oh, yes,” I said — and then I remembered that the machine was loaded with five-dollar bills — “but you’ll have to wait a minute as I have to change it for mending”. I couldn’t find a one-dollar bill in the house for some time, but finally located a fairly new one in an old pair of pants. Slipping this into the machine, I was ready for Sarah, and as the torn bill slowly passed into the little black “clothes wringer,” out came a fairly fresh bank note. She was enraptured, rushed off to her room, and presently reappeared with a frayed, moldy, and partly torn document. “An’ cud yer do anything with this, Mister Wud?” “What’s that?” I asked. “Well, yer see, Mister Wud, whin I was leavin’ off wurkin’ for Mrs. Jones in Kansas City, the where I’d bin wurkin’ for her for tin years, Mister Jones, who was in the lumber business, said for me not to be puttin’ the sivin hundred dollars I’d saved up in the savin’s bank, the where I’d be loosin’ it, but to invist it in his business where it wud be safe, and he’d be givin’ me six per cent, the while the savin’s bank wud be givin’ me only three per cent — so I give it to him and he give me this paper.” “Have you ever asked him to return the money?” I asked. “Oh, no”, she said, blushing, “I’d not be after naydin it unless I’d be gittin’ married”.