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

These must have been great days for the students at Madison, while Wood’s introduction of excitement, dramatics, and circus technique was beginning to attract world-wide attention both to him and the university. He had been from earliest childhood, and still is today, a circus man, a showman — just as were Archimedes, Galileo, and Copernicus. He is full of childish vanity, God knows, and dearly loves the limelight and applause — but the excitement is more in the thing shown than in himself, so that while he sometimes seems to be an egotist and exhibitionist, he is not actually one in the unpleasant connotation of the words. This distinction was keenly sensed by Professor Benjamin Snow, then head of the Department of Physics at Madison. A new young instructor, or assistant professor as he presently became, was and still is small potatoes in any major university, and if Wood had not been encouraged by this important ally higher up in the faculty — if there’d been an academic stuffed shirt at the head of the department — he could scarcely have obtained the necessary cooperation. Luckily, Snow himself was a dynamic, enthusiastic lecturer and fond of spectacular stunts. The fun Snow and his young instructor had together is recorded in Wood’s notes.

He made me his assistant in the course on general physics for the sophomores. My duties at first were those of the uniformed darky who passes things to the conjurer as required. He was never satisfied with any piece of apparatus that was not the largest in the world, and I made a hit at once by constructing an enormous box for making smoke rings a foot in diameter, similar to the one I had made for my lecture in Chicago, when I was a student in chemistry. A dynamic smoke ring that would knock a large pasteboard box at the further end of the lecture table onto the floor delighted him beyond measure. It was also a new idea to him that smoke was not necessary for the formation of the ring, at all events it had never occurred to him that an invisible ring of air knocking things about was the more spectacular demonstration. Interested for the moment in these whirling vortices, I fussed around and concocted a number of new experiments with the rings, which were described and illustrated with photographs again, this time in the London Nature, including a method of making a ring one half pure air and the other half charged with smoke, so that it left the tube from which it was blown in the form of a U.

This can be done with a pasteboard mailing tube an inch or so in diameter by blowing dense smoke very gently along the bottom of the tube, held horizontally, so that the smoke flows along the bottom of the tube to the other end; then a gentle puff is given, and the half ring emerges. Another device made it possible to form a fat air ring, like a doughnut, with a white thread of smoke as a core, spinning with terrific velocity. This illustrated the very high velocity of rotation along the core of the vortex ring, or on the axis of a tornado. Illustrating the difference between force and work, the latter being defined as a force moving against a resistance through a finite distance, Snow was in the habit of leaning against the end of the lecture table and pushing against it with all his might. “I push, and I push, and I PUSH!”… Getting red in the face, perspiration breaking out on his brow… “There is no motion, I push and push, and I don’t do a particle of work!”… almost collapsing from his herculean efforts.

In one of his lectures I caught him in a slight mistake and being unfamiliar with the rule that “little assistants should be seen but not heard” called his attention to it at the close of the lecture.

His subject was gravitation, and he reminded the class of Jules Verne’s story of a journey to the moon, saying that the author never made a mistake or violated any laws of physics in his fiction.

“You will remember”, he said, “that when the projectile crossed the center of gravity between the earth and the moon, the passengers inside weighed nothing, but floated about without any support, and that, gentlemen, is just what would happen”.

At the end of the lecture, while some of the students were hanging around asking questions and inspecting the apparatus, I ventured the remark that in that particular case Jules Verne had certainly made a mistake; the passengers would float about as soon as the projectile was out of the earth’s atmosphere, for gravitational effects are not felt inside a freely falling or freely rising container. “I think we can prove it by experiment, by putting a half dollar on this book and tossing it up before the window. I think that daylight will be visible between the coin and book throughout its flight”, which was exactly what happened after two or three trials. This convinced Snow that Jules Verne was wrong, in this instance at least.

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