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

Late in the summer of 1894, the Woods started East with the two children, Margaret and Robert, Junior, bound for Berlin.

Chapter Four.

Escapades and Studies in Berlin — Wood Sits In at the Birth of X Rays and Takes to the Air in a Glider

There turned out to be only one water closet in the Leipzig pension where Wood, wife, and babies were to live while he studied chemistry with Ostwald. Moreover, it opened directly off the dining-room! Robert says his father “chose” Harvard for him, and there’s a story that it was Mrs. Wood, influenced by this open plumbing openly arrived at, who “chose” to go on to Berlin.

My own impression is that nobody ever successfully “chose” anything for Wood unless it chanced to coincide with his own choice. Anyhow, wife, babies, bags and baggage, they went to Berlin.

What seems to have first struck and stimulated Robert’s best — or worst — instincts in the German capital was the abundance of signs, placards, and police injunctions indicating that many trivial personal actions, free in democratic countries, were here either forbidden or state controlled. He had known, of course, about the Verboten placards, but not about the Strengsten untersagt ones. They translate literally “strengthily undersaid”, and while Robert insists they merely amused him, I suspect they had the same effect a red flag is supposed to have on the proverbial bull.

The first one he saw was over the window of his compartment in a railway coach, framed under glass in a neat oval bronze frame. It read:

DAS HINAUSLEHNEN DES KÖRPER

ASU DEM FENSTER, IST WEGEN

DER DAMIT VERBUNDENEN LEBENS-

GEFAHR STRENGSTEN UNTERSAGT

(“The leaning out of the body out of the window, is on account of the thereby intimately-bound-up-life-danger strengthily undersaid.”)

He improvised a screw driver, removed the placard, frame and all, put it in his pocket, and subsequently hung it in his room, to study the last two words if and when inspiration flagged. He went out and bought boomerangs, and began throwing them. He rolled rocks down neighboring German mountainsides, creating miniature avalanches. He made flights in Lilienthal’s glider. He set up a huge camera in the street and photographed a cesspool pump in action, under the impression, pretended or real, that he was photographing the Berlin Fire Department.

Richard Watson Gilder, then editor of Century, had been equally stimulated by “Strengsten untersagt”, and had written a poem about it. Young Wood learned the poem by heart and frequently declaimed it at dinner parties. The first two stanzas run:

A Yankee in Deutschland declared
“I know a fine Fraülein here,
Of the Bangor girls she’s the peer.
We’ll go and at once be wed”.
“Oh no” said the Polizei.
Said the Yankee “Why?”
“You cannot at once be wed
It is strengthily undersaid.
You first must be measured and weighed and then
Tell where you were born and why and when”.

“Oh well” the Yankee declared,

“We’ll go instead for a spin
On our bike through the beautiful streets of Berlin”.
“Oh no” said the Polizei.
Said the Yankee “Why?”
“You cannot go wheeling instead
It is strengthily undersaid.
You first must be measured and weighed and then
Tell where you would wheel and why and when”.

Robert made up another stanza concerning his own Kinder. You had to license and put a number plate on the Kinderwagen (baby buggy) since it was “a vehicle on four wheels.”

Our young father of buggy-licensed babies had meanwhile, of course, begun his studies in the chemistry department at the University of Berlin. After some time spent, however, in dull routine and the working out of “some particularly stupid problems,” he began to drift more and more, as he had at Johns Hopkins, into the physics laboratories and lectures, to see what was happening there. Things looked more exciting, and after talking with Professor Rubens, who spoke perfect English, Wood took the plunge: he was definitely tired of physical chemistry and decided that physics would be his field.