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

He was told he could not start on research until he had performed all the preliminary experiments of the Kleine Practicum, which corresponds to undergraduate laboratory work in America. They were willing, however, to take his word that he had already done all but some half dozen of the experiments. The first experiment they required him to make was the accurate determination of the time of oscillation of a torsion pendulum, i.e., a large metal disk, suspended at its center by a wire, which slowly rotates first to the right and then to the left. On reading the instructions and thinking over the matter, Wood decided he knew a better method. On trial it proved to be simpler and more accurate than the classical one in use in the laboratory. Professor Blasius, who directed the work, was so much impressed that he asked Wood to write a paper on the subject; and Professor Warburg, the Director of the Physical Institute, approved its publication in the Annalen der Physik.

Thus Wood’s formal entry into the field of physics was marked by an example of the experimental daring that was to characterize all his future work. He continued to experiment on the side; and two papers of his — one on a lecture method of showing the nature of optical “caustics” and the other an ingenious method of determining the duration of the flash of an exploding gas — were published in the London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine (commonly known as the Philosophical Magazine, or, more intimately, as Phil. Mag.), which was the leading English-language review in physics.

But the most exciting scientific event of Wood’s Berlin days was to come. Here is his own account of it:

One memorable morning in the early winter of 1895 Professor Blasius came to us in great excitement. “Come this way, something very wonderful has just been received”. We hurried along after him into one of the smaller rooms, where hanging on the wall were half a dozen or more strange-looking photographs, a life-size human hand with all of the bones clearly outlined, a purse with a number of coins inside, a bunch of keys inside a wooden box, and other objects. “What in the world are they?” we asked. “They just arrived”, he replied, “in the Geheimrath’s morning mail. Professor Roentgen of Würzburg sent them. They were made by some new kind of rays that penetrate most opaque substances and cast shadows on the photographic plate of metals and other dense materials. He calls them X rays, because x represents an unknown quantity in algebra, and he has no idea what they are. They come from the glass wall of a vacuum tube, where the cathode rays strike it”.

Later in the day Warburg came to my room holding in his hand the little ten-page reprint of Roentgen’s paper, asking me if I cared to read it, and if so, to please leave it on his desk after lunch. The pages had not been cut, so I cut them up the side and along the top, read the paper, and left it on his desk.

Early in the afternoon he came to my room in a rage. “Herr Wood, why have you cut these pages?” going on to say that he had borrowed the reprint from the newsstand on the corner (they were on sale all over Berlin, at ten cents a copy), that Roentgen would send him a copy, and that now he would have to pay the news dealer, as I had spoiled the copy by cutting the pages. I said that he had suggested that I read it, and that I couldn’t very well read it without cutting the pages. “Why not?” he replied. “You can read it this way” (holding his finger between the pages, spreading them apart, and peeking in from the bottom). “That is what I did”. I said I’d be delighted to pay the news dealer and keep the copy myself. “Good. You can do that”, he beamed. I still have the reprint!

Within a day or two the laboratory was humming with the buzz of the vibrating spring interrupters of every Ruhmkorff induction coil that could be found in the instrument cases. Everyone who could blow glass and had access to an air pump was busy making the pear-shaped glass bulbs, sealing in electrodes, and laboriously exhausting them with cumbersome mercury pumps, which were all that we had at the time. The laboratory had gone X-ray mad. We photographed our hands, mice, small birds, and all sorts of things. I wrote a long story of the discovery, illustrated with photographs, and sent it to the leading Chicago newspaper. This was the first account to reach America, with the exception of a five-line cable. It was returned by the editor saying that they had already published a full-page story in the Sunday issue, illustrated with photographs made by a South Side photographer, who had antedated and beaten Roentgen — he had photographed the insides of a piano through the case, the vitals of a typewriter through its tin cover, and other impossible subjects, all transparent fakes of course.