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 crossbow came about because Rob’s parents wouldn’t let him have a gun while two of the boys in his gang had rifles. Rob and the less fortunate ones went hunting with slingshots. He had read somewhere about the steel crossbow, and proceeded to make one, with the help of the shop foreman. Shooting an arrow tipped with a heavy bolt of steel, which he also made, it penetrated oaken targets deeper than any rifle bullet. What impressed the boys most was that it kicked like a shot- gun.

Another discovery that made him a sort of king among the kids was that he had learned to apply the principle of the siphon, with the help of an old book of his father’s and a bent stick of macaroni. There’d been a thaw in January, and a flat space at the bottom of the boys’ coasting hill had turned into a little pond of water. This was bad, because as you coasted down where there was still ice you gathered speed. Then your sled hit the pool and you were drenched with mud and water. Girls on their high runner sleds came down less rapidly and went through fairly well, but no boy, of course, would use a girl’s sled. You simply went on doing belly-whoppers on your own sled, to end soaking wet and covered with mud. Rob appeared with a garden hose and announced that he proposed to dispose of the water. His gang, including older boys who went to the same school, was derisive. There was a rise of more than a foot around the pond, and everybody knew that water wouldn’t run uphill. Rob laid out the hose on the ground, had one of the boys stop up one end with his thumb and poured water into the other end until it was full. Already an embryonic showman, Rob took this end and, instead of laying it on the sidewalk, lifted it up over the high fence which separated the road from the lowland bordering the street. Of course the water came rushing through. It was perhaps Wood’s first public scientific triumph.

Another thing that gave him an ascendancy in the gang was that he had learned all sorts of chemical tricks from the books on his father’s shelves and by his own crude, often daring, experiments. He had a love for fire, which has stayed with him all his life, and took particular delight in explosions and loud bangs. Here again the child was father to the man, for he is a leading authority on high explosives, found the key to the reconstruction of the Wall Street bomb, and has solved a number of bomb mysteries and murders for the police.

He had learned, when he was about fifteen years old, that chlorate of potash and sulphur, both cheap and easy to buy, when mixed together and wrapped in paper and hit with a hammer made a noise louder than any cannon cracker. Not content, he made a larger package, laid it on an old anvil, and hit it with an ax. The explosion nearly broke his arm. This didn’t discourage him. He was all for bigger and better noises. When Fourth of July approached he bought twenty pounds of the stuff and with the help of his cousin Bradley Davis and the boy next door set some posts in the earth and built a pile driver ten feet high with a heavy iron weight which when released from a catch at the top by a long cord fell on the old anvil. The first time they tried it, as he joyfully remembers, complaints came in that “the horses in a stable some doors away nearly stampeded, and the windows in neighboring houses rattled.” What he remembers best is that the concussions tore the leaves off all his mother’s raspberry bushes.

Bradley Davis later escaped Rob’s Mephistophelian influence and is now professor of botany at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor!

The three young devils had eight or ten pounds of the explosive mixture left over at the end of the day. They hid it in the cellar of a new building under construction near the railroad station and went blithely off to Boston to see the fireworks on the Common. Rob had learned that if you don’t hit the stuff with a hammer — or a pile driver — but merely put it in a pile and set it afire, it doesn’t explode but burns with a fierce blue flame. They were going to top off the evening by lighting up the town on their return. Rob didn’t know everything about the stuff's properties yet, and they had the unfortunate idea of utilizing some leftover firecrackers so that the flare would be accompanied by pleasing though small detonations. On their return shortly after midnight, they set the mixture, surrounded by cannon crackers, down in the middle of the street in front of the Congregational Church, lighted the chemicals — and ran.

Says Wood: