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

This discovery came at an opportune time for the university. The state legislature was then in session, and President Adams had asked for an appropriation of two hundred thousand dollars to build an engineering laboratory. Serious opposition had been offered by the legislators, who asked what the university had ever done for the state. This was satisfactorily answered by referring to the recent gift to the people of the thawing invention and the method of relieving recurrent water famines. Thereupon the legislature promptly and enthusiastically granted the request.

The trustees of the university rewarded this gift to the people by changing my title from that of instructor to assistant professor.

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The reader will agree, I think, that in this case the professor could have bragged a little if he felt like it. My own guess is that in addition to the inventive genius involved, he showed the cagey practical wisdom of the fox in choosing the Senator’s pipes for the initial demonstration! Maybe he knew and maybe he didn’t that Senator Vilas was a key man on that appropriation committee. As for the plumbers of the world, instead of being disgruntled, as some newspapers had predicted, they were enchanted. They all now use the Electric Thaw, the wide world over.

Young Wood’s next extracurricular contribution to excitement and revolution on and outside the campus involved no inventive genius. In the autumn of 1899 he brought out as a bright new toy from Boston an early model of the Stanley Steamer — the first automobile ever seen in the state of Wisconsin. And he soon set the state on its ear by scorching around at the terrific speed of twenty miles an hour. It arrived just before Thanksgiving Day, and one of the first things Rob did was to invite President Adams, the venerable, white-bearded head of the university, for a joy ride.

“I took him out”, says Wood, still chuckling after these long forty years, “to the Thanksgiving football game. The field was surrounded by a dirt track where horse races were held. We careened furiously around the track, with the brass band blaring, students cheering, and old President Adams’s white hair and beard flying in the wind”.

And then — believe it or not — Wood and Professor Joseph Jastrow drove all the way to Milwaukee! It was eighty miles through ruts and sand and dirt, and the gasket of the steam chest blew out. Wood cut out a new one from the rubber tread on the car’s step. They got there and came back — literally under their own steam. This, of course, was front-page stuff. The Madison Democrat carried the news that “two scientists” had “demonstrated the practicability of automobiles for ordinary country roads”, and that “there was scarcely any inconvenience or danger from the frightening of horses and pedestrians along the way”.

However, the column entitled “Vox Populi” in that same journal raised an almost immediate yowl of protest. Wood and his Stanley Steamer were making a hell of a sensation. It was one of the first good cars ever made — but it was a steam engine. It made the noises and emitted the smoke and steam and occasional flames peculiar to steam engines and Chinese dragons. Also frequent loud explosions when the fuel was turned on, vaporized in hot tubes, and passed to the burners, which were ignited at the side with a match. Whenever there was a transverse wind of considerable force, sheets of blue fire were blown out at the side of the car, and small boys shouted, “Hey, Mister, your thing’s on fire!” But what was worse for timorous souls who never dreamed of owning one was that this hell buggy whizzed over the roughest roads at “a dangerous and appalling speed”. So Rob was openly denounced as a “scorcher”, in a letter to the editors by a dear old lady who signed herself “Carroll Street”. She wrote:

I may be over-nervous in my advancing years, and magnify unduly modern dangers; but I do dread our fast bicycle riders, and now that we have an automobile I hope I shall be excused for experiencing some dread of that too. It is not on my own account, however, that I entertain fear, but for my grandchildren whose thoughtless play often takes them into the street. The automobile goes like a “scorcher” — at 20 miles an hour I should judge — too fast certainly for public safety on our thronged streets. Scorching is under ban. Now I suggest that an ordinance be passed forbidding automobiles to exceed a 6-mile speed within the city limits. There will be more of these machines among us soon, I have no doubt, and the question of regulation should be settled at once. Such action, I am told, has been taken in all other places where automobiles are run. The new vehicle gives tone to the town, and I am not too old to like that. I even want to see others come, but let’s have the ordinance before any damage is done.