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

It was a purely rhetorical question, and we did not press the point. I spent most of my time lugging my forty pounds of camera, tripod, and dry plates around — occasionally also making water-color sketches, frequently pestered by formidable gendarmes. When they were too suspicious or belligerent, I displayed Prince Hilkorff’s letter. We went to St. Petersburg first, and then to Moscow.

From Moscow to Nizhni Novgorod and the Fair was a night’s trip. As we had unlimited transportation free, we spent a week shuttling back and forth between the two cities, saving hotel bills by sleeping on the night express, the Kourierski. The first-class compartment for two had a single wide seat extending from the window to the wall of the narrow corridor. By raising the back, which was hinged to the wall, and then fastening two bolts, we had an excellent upper and lower berth.

We finally got off for Siberia on the Moscow night express to Chelyabinsk, just beyond the Ural mountains, where the then new trans-Siberian line started. We got along well and economically living on trains in Russia. We had our teapots and blankets and were able to buy food at a cost of about half a ruble (twenty-five cents) a day. We lived chiefly on fruit and “meat balls” as we called them — a hash of meat, chicken, and whatnot, enclosed in dough and fried in deep lard. One of them made a meal, and they cost only about five cents apiece, hot from the pot at every railway station. With plenty of fruit, it made a not too badly balanced diet, and we thrived on it. Also, across the tracks, at every railroad station, there was a huge brass samovar, the size of a barrel. At each stop it was charged upon by a crowd of men and women armed with teapots. Hot water was free, and there was always a “free for all” around the samovar. Willard and I formed a “De Land wedge” (football in the nineties), with the help of two or three men we’d met on the train, and went through the crowd like a snowplow through a drift.

At one point in the first stage of the trip, we had an opportunity to leave the train and travel by river for a day or so — on the Volga between Syzran, as I recall it, and Samara. We steamed all day in the bright sunshine, through a flat country, drawing up late at night against a few boards laid on the bank which served as a wharf. It was pitch dark and the single small oil lantern disclosed a pool of ankle-deep, soft mud beyond the makeshift wharf, through which we waded to the road where vehicles awaited us. They were primitive carts or chariots, with wide and shallow wicker baskets half full of straw swung between the high wheels. We piled in with our legs hanging over the edges, and were off at a gallop with shouting and cracking of whips, across the steppes, in total darkness…

At Chelyabinsk we got aboard a trans-Siberian construction train, and had a compartment in a first-class coach which carried construction engineers. The road wasn’t yet open for passengers. These trains ran at irregular intervals, perhaps one a week, and made only about twenty miles an hour over rails that had been merely spiked to crossties that lay in the sand. The stone ballast hadn’t yet been put down. Most of the stations were merely shanties where the telegraph operator lived. The whole job was going to cost over $175,000,000.

Omsk was the first large town we reached. The train was to remain there four days, and we wanted to live aboard her, but the guards and crew (small blame to them) insisted on locking it up for the period. Forced out, we took a room in the Hotel Moscow, where we had to sleep, with our own blankets, on bare mattresses, since sheets and blankets were not supplied. Russian travelers in those days were in the habit of carrying their own bed linen. The mattress was infested with bugs, and our first night was a horror. We brushed the bugs to the floor, but they kept crawling back. Then we put saucers filled with kerosene under the legs of the bed. Then the bugs climbed the wall to the ceiling and began dive bombing us. Next morning we went down to the station, exhibiting our tortured hides — and the letter from Prince Hilkorff — saying we knew His Highness wouldn’t want protégés of his to be eaten alive and begging permission to sleep in the locked train. They took pity on us, and we spent a delightful three days in Omsk, walking, riding in the “haycart” cabs, and swimming in the Irtish.

Willard was writing for American newspapers, and in one of the old clippings, this paragraph occurs.