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

The feature of the evening was announced as an aeroplane flight from the roof of the barn. An iron wire had been fastened from a pole on the top of the barn, descending at a small angle all the way across the wide lawn to the front gate of the house. From this was suspended on two small steel roller trolleys a huge Weather Bureau box kite used in meteorological investigations, which had been sent to me as an aid in kite photography experiments. At the appointed hour I appeared on the lawn clothed in some ridiculous aviation suit, goggles, beard, etc. Introduced by a barker as Bleriot, the first man to cross the English Channel by air, I mounted a ladder behind the barn, climbed up over the roof, and hoisted the box kite over the ridge pole, with a straw man, clothed as I was, suspended below it. Lighting the stick of red fire between the fore and aft wings and giving the machine a push, I sank back out of sight behind the ridge pole. Away it went with a streak of red smoke behind and the trolley wheels adding their scream to the screams of the women which rose when the whole contraption — man, machine, and red fire — crashed into a bush by the gate.

* * *

Towards the end of this crowded year of 1909, Columbia University wrote to Wood asking him if he would care to be an Adams Research Fellow of Columbia. There was a fund left by Edward Dean Adams of New York as a memorial to his son, Ernest Kempton Adams, the income to be devoted to maintenance of a research fellow and the publication and distribution of the results of the research.

All that Professor Wood would have to do in return for the honorarium was to permit the publication of his papers by Columbia University in the form of a book, for the years during which he held the fellowship.

Wood accepted it and held the fellowship for three years. It enabled him to take a sabbatical in 1910-11, and again in 1913-14, Johns Hopkins University paying him half salary during the years which he spent abroad.

Chapter Ten.

Wood Sets Up the Mercury Telescope in a Cowshed — and Puts the Famous Cat in the Barn Spectroscope

Ding, dong, bell,
Prof is in the well.
What did he put in?
A basin full of tin.
What did he get out?
Nothing, just about.

Wood’s invention of the so-called mercury telescope — a revolving dish of quicksilver at the bottom of a pit — was one of the most sensational, useless, and significant things he ever did. It was constructed on the principle that mercury in a shallow metal dish, when rotated, assumes the form of a paraboloidal reflecting mirror. The dish of mercury was placed at the bottom of a well beneath an old cowshed with a hole ripped in its roof, and rotated slowly by a motor while the observer at the top of the well looked down through an eyepiece lens at the enlarged, reflected images of celestial bodies as they crossed the zenith.

Wood had the machine built by Warner and Swasey of Cleveland, the celebrated makers of large astronomical telescopes. Every conceivable refinement had to be made to secure a smooth rotation of the dish of mercury, since any jar to the dish would cause ripples on the surface of the mercury and distort the images formed in the mirror. Wood had the brilliant idea of accomplishing this by surrounding the mercury dish with an independently mounted rotating collar, driven by an electric motor and attached to the mercury dish only by thin bands of rubber. These rotated the dish without transmitting the vibrations of the motor. The focal length of the instrument could be varied from four to fourteen feet by altering the speed of the motor. Standing at the edge of the well and looking down into it, one saw the images of the overhead stars, enhanced to the brilliance of distant arc lights, suspended in space at the mouth of the well — an especially marvelous sight when the great star cluster in the constellation of Hercules crossed the zenith.

On August 27, 1908, the New York Times gave the entire streamered front page of its Section II to a profusely illustrated piece entitled:

A NEW IDEA FOR READING THE STARS

Wood of Johns Hopkins at East Hampton Working on a Telescope that isn’t a Telescope with a Lens that isn’t a Lens.