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

After Dr. Wood had found this letter, buried in his jumble of old yellow clippings, I said, “Well, I guess — except of course for your serious scientific work begun at Madison, which we haven’t touched yet — this about cleans up the high lights of the Wisconsin period”.

He said, “Yes… but I’ve forgotten to tell you I’m now a senator out there..”.

“What kind of a senator?”

“I’m a Roman senator, toga, gold band, and everything..”.

“How come?”

“Well”, said he, “it happened years later, after I’d gone to Johns Hopkins and bought this place here at East Hampton. You know Albert Herter has had a studio and summer house here for years. He came over one day and asked if I’d pose for him. I told him it depended on what kind of a pose. He told me it was for a mural in the Statehouse at Madison, Wisconsin, and that he wanted me to be a Roman senator. So I posed in a toga with a gold band around my head. The likeness was perfect even to the lock of black hair that formerly hung down over one side of my forehead, a strange coiffure for a Roman senator. I later saw the mural, covering one whole wall of the Appellate Court. The senators are seated in a semicircle, with me at the end in front receiving the Roman general, with his aides, carrying the spoils of war. One of the present members of the Department of Physics told me they always took visiting physicists to see it as a ‘horrible example’ of what happened to brash young instructors”.

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Chapter Seven.

Wood Begins His Great Work with the Spectroscope — Becomes Grandfather to Mickey Mouse — and Lectures Before the Royal Society

Young Professor Wood’s early and final decision to make physical optics his special field came in a curious way, toward the end of his first year at Madison. Professor Snow had asked him to undertake a graduate course of lectures on that subject — which Wood had never studied before. He willingly agreed and began to bone up, keeping just a jump ahead of his classes at first. He says that when the bell rang at the end of the hour he had just about reached the end of his knowledge of the subject. But soon he began pulling ahead. He was reading the current journals of physics and found that marvelous new fields of optics were being opened up which were not treated in the textbook he was using, Thomas Preston’s Theory of Light. By the end of the year he had done enough independent study to realize that Preston was at least ten years behind the times. So he made his decision — he would make physical optics his specialty, and he would write his own textbook!

You will have to go a long way to beat that, I think, as a piece of sheer scholastic impudence. But the joker is that he did it — and that the monumental opus stands today, in its third revised edition and translated into German, French, Russian, and other languages, as one of the world’s standard books on the subject. The book was to take five years to complete, and was not to appear until Wood had gone to Johns Hopkins, but he immediately plunged into experimental work that was to get him world-wide attention and, in the local papers, the name of the Wisconsin Wizard.

Just what was the subject that Robert Wood was choosing? Physical optics is the scientist’s name for what he practices when he combines the resources of physics and chemistry to study and learn all he can of the nature, habits, and possible uses of light. In a sense it is a science that is as old as man’s first speculation of the cause of the rainbow; but as a modern science it may be said to date from Sir Isaac Newton, who first proved that a prism simply breaks white light into its component parts, which can be reassembled again into white light. For nearly two hundred years after Newton, scientists were preoccupied with the basic characteristics of ordinary light. They measured its velocity through space. They noted how light rays were bent when they passed through other media, such as glass, quartz, water, or colored solutions, and they formulated the laws of this bending, or refraction, to give us the telescope and the microscope. They noted how light passed through a narrow slit tends to spread out, and how no shadow, when minutely examined, shows a sharp break between black and white, and they named this phenomenon diffraction. They studied also the phenomenon of interference, in which one ray of light cancels out another and complete darkness results. By the middle of the nineteenth century they knew enough about light to know that light, heat, electricity, and magnetism were allied phenomena: they were waves of energy radiating in a hypothetical medium called the ether, and they differed from one another only in their wave lengths and their frequency of vibration.