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

Later we learned that he was the “lumber king” of Wisconsin. It was my first meeting with an American captain of industry, or tycoon, as he would now be called. He was truly interested in astronomy, and had said a thing so extremely gracious it embarrassed me. When I thanked him for his hospitality, he had quoted the line about “entertaining an angel unaware”.

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Wood’s official “job” at the University of Chicago was confined largely to cleaning up apparatus after Professor Henry N. Stokes’s lectures, and he presently resigned that appointment in favor of the janitor. Here is Wood’s own description of what followed.

Professor E. A. Schneider, a German, captured me for “research work,” suggesting what he described as a very interesting line of work on titanium. The first stage of the “research” was the preparation of a large quantity of potassium titanofluoride, a chemical that was not on the market. I would need a platinum dish and some of the mineral rutile, which he said he would order for me. The dish turned out to be as big as a finger bowl, and cost three hundred dollars, which I had to pay out of my own pocket, and there was about twenty pounds of rutile, which I had to pound in a mortar and pass through a fine sieve, until the whole mass was reduced to a powder as fine as pepper. It took about two weeks, and the black powder got in my hair and my nose, and over my clothes. Then came several weeks of work in fusing a mixture of potassium carbonate and the powder in the platinum dish, treating the mess with hydrofluoric acid, and crystallizing the product. I began to chafe over the monotony of going through this process over and over again, but Schneider kept me at it until the whole mass of rutile had been converted into the double salt. I said, “Well, what do we do now?” and was told that nothing more was to be done on the problem at present, and he would give me something else to do in the meantime. I smelled a rat, or I might more properly say a skunk, and spoke to Dr. Lengfeld about the work. He intimated that he thought I would make more progress if I took a real problem instead of serving as a manufacturer of chemicals.

So I left Schneider, who appropriated the large bottles of the preparation on which I had spent so much time and money. Later on I was told that he probably wanted it for some of his own work, and he even offered to take the platinum dish off my hands for half price, but that didn’t work. I started work under Felix Lengfeld’s direction and gradually forgot the unpleasant experience. Schneider left the university a year or two later. Years later, looking through the volumes of the German periodical, Anorganische Chemie, I found a paper by Schneider on the chemistry of titanium, in which he stated that he employed as his basic material the compound potassium titanofluoride, with no acknowledgments or statement of where he obtained it. He just took it out of a hat, like a rabbit. I kept the platinum dish for several years and eventually sold it for more than I had paid for it.

After my routine with rutile, I started a more interesting piece of work under Dr. Lengfeld’s direction, and published two papers in the American Chemical Journal. I reported the results of my research work at the weekly meeting of the Chemistry Colloquium, and felt a little nervous, as it was the first time that I had appeared before a critical audience. The subject was rather technical, and I had formed a resolve never to “read” a paper. It went off fairly well, and I found that embarrassment faded away rapidly as I went on.