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 breakfast, Lord Rayleigh took us out to his laboratories, which were in a wing of the house. Here I felt more at home, for it was much like my own laboratory only more so: homemade mercury air pumps, the glass tubes mounted on weather-beaten boards which had outlived their usefulness elsewhere. There was a profuse use of laths, string, and sealing wax, which delighted my soul, for I realized that it was with this primitive apparatus that England’s foremost physicist had made his most important discoveries. Finally he turned to me and said with his warm and genial smile, “Professor Wood, I wonder if you could repeat for us here any of your very interesting demonstrations with sodium vapor”. I said, “Possibly, if I can use your glass-blowing lamp and you have some metallic sodium”. While I was busy blowing glass bulbs, Lord Rayleigh was hunting for his sodium. There were endless glass cases, the shelves covered with cobwebbed bottles of chemicals of very old vintage. Finally I joined him in his search. “I have a jarful somewhere, but it seems to have disappeared. I’m afraid we’ll have to give it up”. As we walked along I spied, over in the corner of a top shelf, a glass preserve jar half full of yellowish liquid with some dark lumps in it. I opened the door and said to Lord Rayleigh, “I have a feeling that if this was my laboratory I should be inclined to keep my bottle of sodium about here”, and reaching back with my arm, I drew out the dust-covered jar. “Ha, ha”, said Rayleigh, his eyes twinkling, “I believe you have it! There seems to be nothing about sodium that you can’t discover, even its hiding place”. So we went at it. I loaded the bulbs with the metal, pumped out the air, and sealed them with flame; formed the colored deposits; and showed the remarkable color changes produced by local cooling. I then got my long gas burner, and in half an hour set up the demonstration with the long sodium vapor tube showing anomalous dispersion.

As we were walking back to lunch Lord Rayleigh turned to Professor Kayser and said, “Well, we have had a most interesting morning”. “Yes, indeed”, said nice old Kayser, “very, very interesting”. Lummer, who was walking beside us, thrust his hand inside the breast of his long frock coat, threw back his head, and sniffed. “Was mich anbetrifft, ich habe nichts Neues gesehen” (As for me, I have seen nothing new).

At the end of our visit we were all taken over to Cambridge and quartered in the college dormitories. Arthur Balfour, Lady Rayleigh’s brother, was the president of the Association that year and gave the opening address. The meeting then broke up into sections, and the members read their papers or showed their new tricks. I had set up half a dozen or so demonstrations with sodium vapor which were kept in continuous operation with the help of two student volunteers; also a row of transparent photographs in color, made by my diffraction process. There was a crowd milling around the tables most of the time. Lummer was further down the hall in a small dark room, showing the fine structure of the green mercury line with one of the interferometer plates that he and Professor Gehrke had recently developed. I was very much interested in it and stopped in later in the morning. There was only one other visitor, so I was given full opportunity to show my interest by asking all sorts of questions, which, however, were answered in a slightly haughty manner. Later on, a Cambridge don came up to me and said, “Oh, I say, what sort of a chap is this fellow Lummer? He’s grousing to everybody about everyone’s crowding into your show and not coming to his, which he says is far more important!”

The afternoon session of the physics group was crowded.

Lord Rayleigh was the chairman, and there were some eight or ten prominent physicists seated on the platform. There was one vacant chair next to Lord Rayleigh, who caught my eye, smiled, and pointed to the empty chair. As I was half way back and the room had quieted down for the opening, I shook my head, but he pointed to the chair again and beckoned me to come. Slightly embarrassed, I walked up the aisle, climbed up on the platform, and sat down. Then, to my amazement, I saw Lummer, who was also seated far back, leap to his feet and advance toward the platform, on which he seated himself with his feet on the floor, determined to occupy, at all costs, his “place in the sun”. When the time for my paper came, Lord Rayleigh, in announcing the title, added with an amused smile that I had even succeeded in discovering the missing bottle of sodium in his laboratory after he had searched for half an hour with no results.

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