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

I had discovered an extensive deposit of some material which is dark in ultra-violet light, close to the crater Aristarchus. This deposit shows scarcely at all in the pictures made in yellow light, while it is nearly black in pictures made by light confined to the ultra-violet range around wave-length 3000.

Parallel experiments made in the laboratory showed that many substances which are white in ordinary light are jet black when photographed with these very short waves. Chinese white (zinc oxide) and most white garden flowers are good examples. These white flowers, if growing on a snow-bank, would be nearly invisible, and would not appear in photographs made in the usual way, but would be clearly brought out in pictures made with the quartz lens and the silver film.

In this same year, 1909, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences gave Wood the American gold Rumford Medal for his work on the optical properties of metallic vapors, and Clark University, at Worcester, Massachusetts, conferred on him the degree of LL.D., in company with other distinguished American and European scientists, including Freud and Vol- terra, the celebrated Italian mathematician. Wood has never taken his honors any too seriously, and here’s what he says, recollecting the occasion.

After the rather heavy and solemn ceremonies were over Professor Webster, head of the Physics Department, invited us to his house for cheese and beer. As things dragged a bit, Webster asked me to show them a celebrated parlor trick I’d invented when a student at Johns Hopkins.

Lying on the floor one evening and watching the inverted face of one of the graduate students who was talking while standing up, I had been intrigued by the ludicrous expressions of the talking mouth when viewed upside down. In my imagination I pictured eyes and nose on the chin to complete a small face engaged in animated conversation. It was screamingly funny, and I at once got out my water colors and painted the eyes and nose in the proper position with respect to the mouth, laid a mirror flat on a table, seated myself before it, and covered the upper part of my face with a black veil, transparent enough to see through. By holding a mirror in my hand well out in front of me, I could see the reflected image of the little face right side up in the large mirror, and I recited Jabberwocky with many grimaces to observe the effect. It was a great success, and had been exhibited on many occasions to small but enthusiastic audiences seated in front of the mirror. After the performance in Webster’s parlor was over and the laughter had died down, dear old Volterra came up to Webster and, shrugging his shoulders and holding his hands palms up in a gesture of despair, said plaintively, “C’est plus gai ici qu'en Europe!”

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Despite metallic vapors, gold medals, hard work, and what- have-you, the Woods had been keeping things pretty gay too in summertimes at East Hampton. Believe it or not, our professor learned to dance the bunny hug and turkey trot, and is credited with a howling wisecrack when someone asked if he wasn’t afraid of treading on the feet of the young matron who was giving him a lesson in the. then new “close-up” clinches. “How can I?” he demanded, “when her feet are always behind me?"

Costume parties, barn dances, amateur theatricals followed one another in dizzy succession every summer, and each gave Wood a chance to demonstrate his ingenuity and high spirits. The “face on the chin” trick was elaborated into a vaudeville act by projecting it in color by a homemade lantern onto a huge white head made from a properly compressed pillow. (Ziegfeld later experimented with the idea.) But Wood probably got most fun out of an “aeroplane flight” that was the climax of a vaudeville show that the Woods put on in the famous barn. Here is Wood’s account of it.