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 first really interesting thing I found in the factory was something that gave me a start in the study of electricity. I noticed that on going down a long dark passageway which conveyed a huge belt carrying the power from a flywheel to the blower operating the blast furnace, my hair always stood on end. I thought at first it might be because I was afraid. But I knew I wasn’t afraid and sought some other explanation. I wondered if there was a wind coming from somewhere. I held my hand up toward the whirring belt to see if wind was coming from it. Immediately purple streamers of fire began flying from the ends of my fingers. I was fascinated and excited. I put my hand closer to the belt, and a long spark leaped out to my hand. Like all children, I knew about electric sparks from the cat’s back, from shuffling along a heavy carpet and touching a doorknob — and I had found out how to pick up tiny bits of paper with sealing wax subjected to friction. I had also been reading Arnold’s Elements of Physics. In consequence, I realized at once that in that belt from the great flywheel I had a powerful static electric machine at my disposal. I know now that the belt I began to use might almost be considered the progenitor of the Van de Graaff generator. I made Leyden jars and various others pieces of apparatus which are only practical with a source of electricity of considerable volume.

I never had a serious accident, but once I had a narrow escape — nearly lost my right hand and perhaps part of my arm. No matter how big and powerful machinery becomes, one of the most dangerous things in any shop remains the power-driven buzz saw. I had a heavy board on the buzz saw once, when it suddenly jumped out of my hand, but in the jumping pulled me forward so that my wrist almost went down on the saw. The workmen told me that I had got hold of a piece of “springy” wood. After it passes the saw, it clamps together on the saw, then jumps and pulls you forward.

* * *

Wood had by that time begun playing with and experimenting with all the big machinery including the hydraulic presses. He apparently refrained from inflicting on his mother any confidences concerning his experiments and narrow escapes. He played there only after school and Saturdays, since she was meanwhile sending him to Mrs. Walker’s select “fitting school,” and later to that of another unfortunate lady, Miss Weston, a spinster. Rob’s outstanding memory of Mrs. Walker’s was when two of the older boys locked her in the water closet, which opened off the main schoolroom. When she’d been released from durance indeed vile, she pinned it down on two brothers, past masters of mischief, and said before the whole school:

“Malcolm and Isaac, pick up your books and go straight home and never return to this school!”

The boys strapped up their books, but one of them turned on his way out and called back:

“Mrs. Walker, here goes three hundred and fifty dollars straight out through this door.” They were of course back again in two or three days.

Mrs. Walker’s reports of young Robert, in the meantime, were completely discouraging, though not so scandalous. She said he was inattentive, almost dull, and that his mind seemed almost always to be “wandering somewhere else.”

Where else it “wandered,” when it wasn’t absorbed at the Sturtevant plant or in exploding bombshells, Dr. Wood tells in his own words. The account goes back now somewhat in time sequence, but helps fill out the picture.