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

I looked up to and admired Charlie. He was nearly four years older, as I remember, and I was terribly anxious to be noticed by him. The Sturtevants had a large greenhouse in their back yard, and Charlie had a beautiful aquarium, almost like a swimming-pool, with various fish in it. I must have been seven or eight, and had begun to collect butterflies with a net I’d made of mosquito netting. One day as I passed along a small canal ditch by the roadside, I saw little fish swimming there, waded in, scooped some up, threw away my butterflies, and put the fish in my glass jar and took them home to Charlie for his aquarium. I said, “I don’t suppose you’ll want them, they’re only common minnows.” Charlie examined them and said, “Why, those aren’t minnows! They’re fine game fish. They’re baby pickerel.” I was thrilled and happy, and from that time on Charlie began to show some interest in me. Then Charlie did not appear for a long time, and I was told one morning that he had died. I was stunned for a few days and could not realize that I would never see him again. Now that Charlie was gone, and the factory was completed, Mr. Sturtevant, I think, must have transferred to me some of the affection he had had for his own son, for he frequently called me to the fence between our gardens and talked to me. When I was about ten years old, he took me all through the huge factory one day — the great Corliss engines, the iron foundry with its blast furnaces, the lathe rooms with their enormous belts and flywheels, machine shops, pattern shops, carpenter shops everything. He introduced me to the superintendents of the various shops and told them to let me come there whenever I wanted to and to let me do anything I wanted, so long as I didn’t hurt myself.

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So that, at an age when most mechanically inclined kids are playing with toy sets of tools and tiny scroll saws in the family woodshed, Rob began not only with the traditional “buzz saw”, but with mighty power-driven machines, hydraulic rams and engines. That he didn’t kill himself — in fact never even had a serious accident — is a tribute to his own skill — and probably also to the friendly watchfulness of foremen and workmen. He was soon literally doing anything he pleased. The workmen in the iron foundry even taught him how to make sand molds, into which they poured the molten iron for his castings. Rob sometimes made mistakes — seldom dangerous ones. He kept a little diary of his exploits, illustrated with his own drawings but devoid of reading matter: this is still extant. The first drawing is the episode of the dumbbells. It occurred before he had begun to understand the plant’s gigantic possibilities. He had put a block of softwood on a big power lathe and started trying to make a pair of dumbbells. Chunks instead of thin shavings were flying, and he had wrenched his hand when a foreman passed, stared, and said, “What are you doing?”

Rob said, “Making a pair of dumbbells.”

The foreman said, “Well, I see one fine dumbbell already. That’s not a chisel you’re using. It’s a screw driver!”

On another occasion, he took a scolding from a superintendent of the plant, E. N. Foss, who had married into the Sturtevant family and was trying to prove his worth by small economies. (He later became governor of Massachusetts). Rob had decided to make an electrical machine which required a large, circular glass plate. Not knowing how to obtain this, he sawed out a circular disk of a dark heavy wood which he intended to varnish. Several days later his mother received a letter from the new superintendent complaining that Rob had destroyed two square feet of “bay mahogany” worth forty-five cents a square foot. Mr. Sturtevant’s new son-in-law had seen the board from which the circular disk had been cut, made inquiries of the workman, and been told that it was done by the boy Mr. Sturtevant had brought down. Rob was severely scolded by his mother and confined for two hours in the “blue room” (guest room, but used as a jail on occasion).

All this, of course, was trivial child’s play, merely a beginning. But even at the start, access to the tool shop, plus his own ingenious imagination, made him a ringleader of the “gang” outside school. Rob had found a book about Norway, with descriptions and pictures of skis. He had never heard of steaming wood to bend it, but went to the Sturtevant works, cut out a pair of skis with a mechanical saw, and curved the ends with galvanized iron and countersunk screws. Next day, he took them to the snow-clad hill where his friends were coasting on sleds, put them on, stood in a superior manner, slid about fifteen feet, and turned over in a snowdrift.