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

All these classroom discoveries and demonstrations were of interest, perhaps, only to students and scientists — but our young instructor soon followed them up with a “practical” invention which immediately obtained for the university a gift from the state of $200,000 and saves the world each winter millions of dollars in losses by fires resulting from the crude methods employed by plumbers. It was the now universally known Electric Thaw.

Since my own knowledge of what to do when my pipes freeze underground is confined to a number in the Rhinebeck Village telephone book which brings “Cart” Sipperley humming out with a service wagon full of precisely the gadgets Wood adapted forty years ago in Madison, and since all I understand about those coiled, imposing gadgets is that they unfreeze my pipes without the need of tearing up my floors and driveways, I’ve persuaded our Promethean Wood to dictate his own version of how he invented the Electric Thaw, and how it does the thawing. “You can brag a little, if you want to”, I told him, and he said with a hurt expression, “You know I never brag”.

The unprecedented cold (he dictated) throughout the whole Northwest in the winter of 1899 froze the ground in Madison down to a depth of eight feet and more. Half the service pipes in Madison were frozen and there was some fear that the mains had ceased functioning. Bonfires were burning on various premises where the plumbers were digging down to get at the service pipes. Our own pipe was frozen, and we had paid a local plumber twenty dollars for thawing it.

I was walking down Langdon Street to the laboratory one morning and passed a group of plumbers who were pushing into the frozen pipe a rubber tube attached to the spout of a portable boiler in an effort to thaw the pipe with steam. They were having trouble because they couldn’t make the tube turn a corner.

I continued on my way to the laboratory, thinking the situation over, and it came into my mind that a heavy current of electricity passed through a metal conductor raises the temperature of the metal, and that moreover an electric current would follow the conductor around any number of turns. Could not this be the solution of the whole trouble — by merely joining the faucet in the house to one wire of an electric generator and carrying the other wire to a faucet in a neighboring house?

On reaching the laboratory I went at once to the office of Professor Jackson, the head of the Department of Electrical Engineering, and suggested this plan to him. He objected to it on the ground that the current would be carried by the earth rather than by the pipes. But when I pointed out that the ground was frozen and that ice was a nonconductor, he agreed to join me in making the experiment.

That same afternoon we had the electric light company bring a transformer on a wagon to the home of Senator Vilas, Chairman of the Board of Regents of the university. Plumbers had been at work for a week in and around his house trying to find a three-hundred-foot service pipe which joined the house with the street main, no record of its position being available. The lawn was covered with what looked like numerous newly made graves and fires burning at other spots to soften the ground.

The linesman who came with the wagon climbed a pole and brought down wire leads from the overhead line supplying the electric light. These were attached to the secondary coil of the transformer, while the wires from the primary were joined to the faucet in the cellar and the street hydrant three hundred feet distant respectively. A large tub of salt water with two copper plates was placed in the circuit to govern the strength of the current.

The current was turned on, and we waited at the open faucet in the cellar. At the end of ten minutes, we heard a gurgling sound and presently a jet of muddy water mixed with ice and rust particles spurted from the faucet into the sink. Loud cheers from the Senator’s family greeted this eruption, and a few minutes later, the butler appeared with champagne glasses, et cetera.

The Madison Democrat the next morning contained a two- column article describing this successful solution of the water famine, and it was relayed by the Associated Press all over the country.

Ever since that time, the electric method has been the standard method over the whole world — one of the large scale developments in recent years being the thawing of a twelve-inch main under the Hudson River, frozen at the two ends where the pipes came near the surface of the ground.