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

Before we’d run half a block one of the cannon crackers went off, and the whole mess exploded with a terrific detonation, followed by loud tinklings of glass from windows of the neighboring houses. The street lamps were extinguished by the concussion, and the whole square suddenly became dark. We ran all the way home and I entered the house as quietly as possible, but mother was awake and called out to me, “Rob, what was that terrible explosion?” I pretended not to hear.

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His relations with his father and mother were “friendly,” he says, and he has no recollections of serious clashes. This is remarkable when one considers that Rob’s father was eighty when he was fourteen, and that while all boys of that age are fiends, Rob’s superendowments made him a superfiend.

On Decoration Day, in 1883, there was to be a parade around the Jamaica Plain monument to the veterans of the Civil War. It was the usual granite monument, surmounted by a soldier leaning on his gun. Rob decided that the monument needed decorating, so, with the help of the boy next door, he procured a large, broad-brimmed farmer’s straw hat, with an elastic to go under the chin. They trimmed it with rosettes of red, white, and blue and a bunch of long streamers of the same colors. The problem was to get the hat on the soldier’s head and slip the elastic under his chin to prevent the wind from blowing it off.

They surveyed the monument the afternoon before the parade, and Rob figured out that he could climb half way up but that the last ten or twelve feet were unscalable. He found a wooden pole about fifteen feet long and topped it with two horizontal jaws held together by elastic rubber bands. The lower jaw could be opened by pulling a string.

At 2:00 a. m. on Decoration Day, Rob crept out of his house and woke the boy next door by standing under his window and yanking a long string that had been attached to the sleeper’s big toe. Then Rob climbed the monument, with the hat firmly clamped by the jaws of his pole. He soon got the hat on the soldier’s head, and by careful manipulation adjusted the elastic under his chin. Stealthily the two boys crept home. Next day, they were sure they would be arrested if they dared step out of doors. So they had to miss the fun of watching irate citizens call out the fire department, with its hook and ladder, to remove the “abominable desecration.”

Another typical boy’s prank, with its special Wood touch, was monkeying with the doorbells of a new apartment house that had been built not far from the Roxbury Latin School where Rob was being bored to death. There was something fascinating about the long row of speaking tubes with push buttons beneath in the vestibule. The idea came suddenly to Rob one day that it would be simple to “short-circuit” them.

He found just what he was looking for at home, in the closet where wrapping paper, string, etc., were thriftily kept. It was a long pasteboard mailing tube about three inches in diameter. This he held against the battery of speaking tubes in the apartment-house vestibule, marking circles on it to coincide with the mouthpieces of the tubes. Later he cut these out with a sharp penknife and closed the open ends of the pasteboard tube.

Then, with the aid of his friend who lived in the house, he fitted this gadget over the speaking tubes, by which operation a multiple “party line” was introduced, making general conversation among the tenants possible.

The little devils then pressed all the push buttons, beginning with the top floor to facilitate a safe getaway. The ensuing confusion, resembling a new Tower of Babel, can be imagined.

Says Wood today, looking back to that part of his childhood spent in the Sturtevant plant: