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

The Wood family spent the summer at Cataumet, Massachusetts, on Buzzards Bay. Wood’s cousin, Bradley Davis, was working at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, within bicycling distance, and some old friends owned a summer cottage there. Wood says he was taken on as outboard ballast by the owners of one of the small racing boats that took part in all the Corinthian yacht club races; he hugely enjoyed the jockeying for a start, which was a new experience for him, though he had sailed a small boat all his life. While in bathing one day he happened to invert a wooden pail over his head, and holding it down on his shoulders with his hands and kicking with his feet, amused the children by the sight of an animated pail moving along by itself. Next day he cut a rectangular hole in one side, set a piece of plate glass in it for a window, and put forty pounds of lead boat ballast around the rim. This weight held the bucket down over the head when filled with air and submerged in water, and enabled the wearer to sink comfortably to the bottom. Then, antedating Beebe, they connected the bucket to a bicycle pump (operated on a rowboat) with twenty feet of rubber tubing, and stayed under water as long as they liked, viewing the fish, seaweed, and submarine landscape.

STUDENT IN BERLIN: Wood in the private laboratory he rigged up in the attic of the University of Berlin laboratory.

LILIENTHAL’S LAST FLIGHT: A photograph made by Wood in 1896 of the last successful flight of Otto Lilienthal, Germany’s great pioneer glider. On his next attempt the following day – Wood was invited to attend but couldn’t – Lilienthal was killed.

Chapter Six.

Wood as Campus Wizard, Thawer of Pipes, Driver of Steam Wagons, Roman Senator

When Robert Wood obtained in 1897 the academically humble and poorly paid post of junior instructor in physics at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, he was a young man just turning his twenty-ninth year, married, with two children — a third, Elizabeth, soon to be born — and he was completely ignorant of the highly special branch of physics destined to bring him his later greatest glory. But while he knew next to nothing yet of physical optics, he was already a daring experimenter in the general field, and began almost immediately to revolutionize undergraduate classroom technique at Madison.

It all began gaily with a series of lecture circuses, staged for the edification and joy of the students, climaxing soon in mirages and tornadoes. The idea that he, as well as Nature’s God, could create these phenomena had come to him the previous summer in San Francisco, when he’d noticed one day a beautiful mirage on the city sidewalk at the top of a hill, where one could look along a long stretch of sun-heated pavement with a sky background behind it. The pavement appeared to be flooded with water in which the inverted reflection of pedestrians was clearly visible. Wood had stationed his two small children at the end of the pavement and photographed the result. Today this type of mirage is observed constantly by motorists on pavements or streets, but at that time it had only been reported as occurring on wide expanses of hot sand in the desert. To create his miniature phantasmic oases and actual whirling sandstorms he procured four flat sheets of iron, each about four feet long and eight inches wide. These he laid end to end, supported on iron stands, making a long, narrow, level vista, which he sprinkled thickly with sand. At the further end he mounted a mirror which, when viewed from the opposite end, showed the reflected image of the sky- backed window. A row of miniature mountains and some palm trees, cut out of paper and arranged on the sand in front of the mirror, represented the horizon of his desert landscape, which was warmed from below by a row of small gas burners under the iron plates instead of from above by the sun. Would it work on this small scale? He lit the burners and commenced observations. The mountains and palm trees were clearly silhouetted against the bright sky, but presently a small pool of brilliantly shining water appeared in front of them at the base of the mountains. If the eyes were raised an inch or two above the level of the sand, the lake vanished, only to reappear as soon as the viewpoint was depressed, just as does a real mirage if we ascend a small hillock. And now the pool increased in size and the reflected images of the mountains appeared, and “if the eye was lowered a trifle more, the mountain chain disappeared completely in the illusory lake, which had now become an inundation”. Needless to state, the students were enchanted — almost to the point of howling with joy — and from then on the new “prof” was ace-high.