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

As to the project of attracting the attention of the Martians to the fact that there are rational beings on the earth, it seems to me that if there are any who insist upon making us conspicuous in this way it would be better to devise some simpler way than the construction of a mirror several miles in diameter. A large black spot on the white alkali plains could be constructed at much less expense, and would be as easily perceived by the Martians, if they exist and have telescopes as powerful as ours. It would be as easy to “wink” signals with the black spot as with a mirror of equal size, probably easier.

The spot could be made in small sections of black cloth arranged to roll up on long cylinders, exposing the white ground underneath, the cylinders being operated simultaneously by electric motors. I am unable to say how much four square miles of cloth would cost. You will have to consult the dry goods houses or the people who write arithmetic.

We should probably get an answer, for the Martians are supposedly older and wiser than we are.

I have never, and am not now, giving any attention at all to the problem of signaling to Mars.

* * *

I don’t think we need go any further to justify my adjective “sensational”. Nor need we blame Professor Wood for the sensationalism. He has perpetrated some gigantic and Gargantuan hoaxes — as hoaxes — but is of a rigid, almost ultraconservative integrity in the field of serious science. He had never sanctioned any of the fantastic and gratuitous predictions. Indeed, he had never claimed anything for the mercury telescope. He had merely invented it, and there it was…

As for my second adjective, “useless”… well, the mercury telescope isn’t there, or anywhere, any more. When the moon rises over the cowshed, no mirror flashes, no Katie waits, and no quicksilver gleams. It has gone the way of the heifer calf. It just didn’t work out pragmatically. One thing I wondered about, and which may have had something to do with its demise, was how the hell you could point a hole in the ground at the particular planet, star, or galaxy you wanted to study at the time? Wood says my wonder is justified, and that later he mounted over the pit a twenty-inch plane mirror of silvered glass and was able to view objects which were widely removed from the zenith. I doubt if it could have helped much.

Now to justify our third adjective, as to its being one of the most “significant” things Wood ever did. The method of driving the mirror with an independent circular rotor he subsequently applied to all of the dividing engines used for ruling diffraction gratings, and at once got rid of certain errors in the proper spacing of the lines. It has since become a standard engineering practice. So, despite its immediate uselessness, the whole thing was of an instructive significance, as an example of how your pure scientist sets himself a problem — which may or may not lead to practical results — and solves the problem by breaking it into its component parts and dealing separately with each. Wood’s own technical description (written at the time and preserved in his scientific papers) of the problem, its motivations and the technique employed in solving it, is a clear, modest, and illuminating exposition of how the wheels go round — in the making of a mercury telescope and also in the scientific brain.

Before it went into limbo, the mercury dish mirrored one profound reflection, not of starlight but of rural American philosophy. It was during the Bryan-Taft campaign, and an old East Hampton farmer, after staring at the myriad stars reflected in the mercury telescope, sighed and said,

“Well, I don’t know as it makes so much difference after all whether Taft or Bryan’s elected..”.

The old farmer’s reflection was profound, but was it original? Or have people been saying it since the time of Pythagoras?