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

So presently I found myself on a steamer heading out through the Golden Gate. The Islands in those days were quite free from the commercialization which they have undergone in the past quarter of a century. You could see real hula dances, while now I’m told they have an expurgated edition sponsored by the Eastman Kodak Company held every day for the benefit of tourists, in front of the beach hotels. I had one or two friends who lived in Honolulu and in a few days a lot more friends, for I was invited to a mou-mou party over a week end. The mou-mou was a native negligee, a single garment, or rather a long burlap gunny sack with three holes at one end, two for the arms and one for the head. On arriving at the large country house set back from the beach, I was informed that we were to shed our clothes and put on mou-mous, with nothing underneath. In this garment, which came down to your knees, you played a game of tennis or sat around tables with iced drinks, and then all went down to the beach for a swim, and then back under the trees, where the gunny sacks dried out in a few minutes, then another drink and another swim, then dinner all in mou-mous around a long table, with champagne, then another swim by moonlight, “and so to bed”, all of the men in one big room and the women in another in a distant part of the house, and the “roll” called before the lights went out to make sure that all were “present or accounted for” and that no one was A.W.O.L.

The tame spiders were terrifying, and were in practically every country house or bungalow on the Islands. They are non- poisonous and are never molested, as they destroy millions of mosquitoes and other insect pests. The body is the size of a small hen’s egg, and the hairy legs spread out over an area the size of a large saucer. I had not been told about them when I visited Gertrude’s cousin on the island of Hilo, and on going to bed, just as I was stooping over to blow out the candle, I was startled by the sudden impact on the top of my head of something that felt like a frog, which bounced off onto the floor and scuttled under the bed. Looking over the ceiling I discovered three more of the creatures lurking in the dark corners. This was dive bombing on a larger scale than in the hotel in Omsk, and I shouted for my host, as I did not feel secure even under the mosquito net which covered the bed. He explained that they were pet spiders and lived on mosquitoes, and would eat out of your hand. Not out of mine, however!

I found that the Royal Hawaiian Hotel occupied the site of my father’s former residence. It was a rather unattractive commercial travelers’ sort of place, and has now, I believe, been replaced by something more suited to the rich tourist class. The Moana at Waikiki Beach was the swank hotel at the time, and it was here that I had my first experience with surfboards. Later on after we had acquired our summer home at East Hampton in 1908 I made surfboards for myself and friends and started that sport on the beach. It spread like an epidemic along the southern shore of Long Island and finally all over the map. As far as I know this was the first time the boards were seen on the Atlantic coast, and though it is very probable that I had many predecessors, it evidently had never “caught on” before, as in the case of my experiments with homemade skis when I was twelve years old.

Bradford Wood[6], one month old, was awaiting my arrival in San Francisco as I came back through the Golden Gate, with a basket of tropical fruits for his mother, all of which were confiscated at the customhouse, only just become bug conscious.

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Back in Baltimore in the autumn of 1902, Wood continued his photography of the moon with invisible light. The contrasts between the dark and light lunar areas were much greater with ultraviolet than with visible light, while the reverse occurred in the case of landscapes. One interesting peculiarity of the landscapes taken in full sunshine was the almost complete disappearance of shadows, showing that the greater part of the ultraviolet rays came from the blue sky and not directly from the sun.

Later on at East Hampton he improved the method by employing a quartz lens with a heavy deposit of metallic silver, which is remarkably transparent to a very narrow range in the ultraviolet and quite opaque to all other rays. With this filter he discovered a large dark area around the lunar crater Aristarchus, which was practically invisible to the eye. Comparison experiments with terrestrial substances indicated that it was sulphur. The Germans named it the “Woodsche Fleck."