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 a picture made with the silver filter a man walking in sunshine was accompanied by no shadow, like Peter Schlemihl in the German fairy story. Distant hills, clearly visible, were blotted out by atmospheric haze when photographed by ultraviolet. Wood later photographed with an infrared filter which showed distant mountains sharply outlined with all their high lights and shadows on days when the haze was so thick as to make them quite invisible to the eye. These later photographs, made in 1908, were the first infrared pictures ever taken.

In the summer of 1903, the Woods rented a cottage at North Haven, Maine, where a number of their new friends in Baltimore spent their vacation. Wood devoted himself to sailing, either in Dr. Stewart Paton’s yawl or in his own dinghy. North Haven was a small village on the island of the same name, south of Mount Desert. At the other end of the island was the still smaller fishing hamlet of Pulpit Harbor. Here apparently daylight-saving time was invented, at least so Wood asserted when making an address years afterwards following a dinner given by the London Physical Society, at the time when the subject was under violent discussion in England. This is the story, as Wood tells it.

One afternoon some of us decided to walk across the island to Pulpit Harbor. When we arrived no one was in sight except an old fisherman mending a lobster pot in the sun. We asked him what time it was, and he pulled out an old tarnished turnip of a watch and said, “Half past five”. “Why”, we said, “it can’t be as late as that. We left North Haven at a little after three and it’s only four miles”. “Oh, well”, piped the old salt, “you know we have fast time here in the Harbor”. “What do you mean by that?” we asked. “Why, we keep our clocks an hour ahead of those over in the City [meaning North Haven]”. “What’s the idea of that?” we inquired. “Oh, I dunno”, he replied. “I reckon it’s ’cause night seems to come sooner. An’ then, too, you see, in the wintertime, the women folk don’t mind gitting up at half past four, but they’d hate like hell to have to git up at half past three”.

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Returning to Baltimore in the autumn, Wood went on with his work on sodium vapor. With the aid of a $500 grant from the Carnegie Institute, he had engaged one of his former graduate students at Madison, A. H. Pfund, to help him during the year, and with $1,000 from his mother to buy necessary apparatus, he started a quite new line of attack on the measurement of the dispersion of sodium vapor with a Michelson interferometer — a bold and delicate undertaking. This was his most important investigation up to that time, and when the results were published in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, scientists from all over the world congratulated him. Lord Kelvin, dean of British physicists, wrote him a warm letter praising his “astonishing and splendid” experimental results. Years later, when Dr. Karl Darrow presented Wood with the Ives Medal of the Optical Society of America, he cited this experiment as an example in saying that “the term, ‘a Wood experiment,’ has come to be employed of any which is distinguished by unusual ingenuity and efficacy, and especially if it is made by simple means”.

Early in the summer of 1904 the Wood family sailed for France from Baltimore on the Hamburg-American Line, going directly to Paris for a visit with Gertrude’s married sister, Alice Robbins. The Robbins apartment was on the Boulevard Montparnasse over the Cafe du Dome, where Wood had his first taste of sidewalk cafe life on the Left Bank. Lionel Walden, the marine painter, Alexander Harrison, Jim Wilder of Honolulu, and Jimmy Sullivan, all artists, inducted the Woods in the gentle pastime of piling up white saucers on the tables along the front of the Dome.

This entire outfit, Wood found, was going to Beg-Meil, a seaside resort near Concarneau, the Breton fishing village, for the summer, and the Woods decided to join them. Wood bought a two-cylinder Darracq touring car, upholstered in scarlet leather, which he said “buttoned up the back”. You entered the tonneau or rear compartment by a little door; when closed it formed the back of the middle seat, which was hinged to the door. The French had to have a strapontin in their autos, of course. Wood called it the “Darracket” on account of its engine noise.

Concarneau was an artist’s paradise, with its brilliantly painted tunny boats with their great colored sails and the smaller sardine boats with their gossamer veils of blue nets floating in the air from masts and spars to dry. Wood, who had for years entertained himself with water colors and drawings, plunged into oils, and spent a gay summer painting, swimming, and talking art with his Left Bank friends.