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

In the audience sat many of the great scientific celebrities then alive in London: Crookes, Dewar, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Lord Rayleigh. In a moment they would be listening to “a young man from Wisconsin”, who would be standing where stood Isaac Newton, Davy, Faraday, and all the great in Britain’s scientific history. But if you think all this overwhelmed our young man from Wisconsin, you don’t yet know him. Says he in his notes: “I showed them the sound-wave photographs and moving diagrams without a hitch and spoke extemporaneously, feeling no more embarrassment than when lecturing to my students at Madison”.

Nonsense! Actually, he was acutely aware of the tremendous honor, and he was undoubtedly boiling with excitement. For it was the dawn of world-wide fame.

Chapter Eight.

Early Years as a Professor at Johns Hopkins — Great Discoveries and Promethean Celebrations

Following the death of the great, gruff Henry Rowland at Johns Hopkins in 1901, Wood was offered and accepted a full professorship in experimental physics there. It was a high honor for so young a man, no matter how fantastic a genius. Gertrude went ahead to Baltimore and selected a house on St. Paul Street in a city block that had looked upon the stoning by secessionists of the Massachusetts regiment on its way to Washington. Returning to Madison, the furniture was packed up and sent on in care of the Baltimore house agent, who installed it on its arrival. The family reached Baltimore late in September. They opened the Baltimore house, unpacked the crate containing the Stanley Steamer, and bounced over the cobblestones with which the entire city was then paved. Surface drainage disposed of all the water used for washing purposes, a thin stream, sky blue on wash day, running out under every back gate and along a shallow gutter in the brick sidewalk. Loose bricks acted as force pumps, squirting a jet of water up your trouser leg almost to the knees if you stepped on one, efficiently adjusted with respect to its neighbors. Wood called them “bath bricks”. The alleys and some of the street crossings had high stepping stones on which you crossed dry-shod in case of heavy rains, but at which the Stanley Steamer shied.

Of his work at Johns Hopkins, Wood says:

My teaching was very light, three lectures a week on physical optics, the same as at Madison, and I gave practically all of my time to research, a part of it in collaboration with graduate students working for the doctor’s degree. With J. H. Moore an investigation was made of the green fluorescence of sodium, with more powerful spectroscopes than the one I had used at Madison. This came along very well, an “infant phenomenon” being observed that became very important when it grew up in later years. Instead of illuminating the vapor in a small glass bulb with white light as I had done at Madison, we shot into it various colored rays in succession obtained by a combination of lenses and prisms called a monochromator, which sifts out from sunlight a very narrow region of the spectrum and projects the beam of pure color at any desired point. We found that when the metallic vapor was illuminated by a beam of blue light, it emitted fluorescent light of a yellow color, but as the color of the beam from the monochromator was changed to bluish green, green, and greenish yellow in succession, the region of maximum intensity in the fluorescent spectrum moved down towards the region of the exciting light and eventually coincided with it, with a suspicion of a trace of light on the further side of it. This was an exception to Stokes’s law of fluorescence, which stated that the light emitted by fluorescent substances was always made up of wave lengths longer than that of the exciting ray, that is, on the red side of it. Many years later unusual fluorescence was very clearly demonstrated in experiments that I made with sodium and iodine vapors, the discovery being of considerable importance in connection with the theory of molecular spectra.