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

Now while the mercury telescope was following the heifer calf into oblivion, Wood was already engaged in the construction — in this same unique barn-cowshed-laboratory at East Hampton — of a gigantic spectroscope, or rather spectroscopic camera, which was destined to become an entirely different kettle of cats. It was, and for years continued to be, the largest and best instrument of its sort in the world, and in addition to making the Woods’ house cat as immortal as the parrot of Archimedes, it marked an epochal advance in spectral knowledge and analysis. One of the many things it did was to resolve for the first time the complicated spectrum of iodine, which has some forty thousand lines. But whenever this is mentioned by scientists and physicists, whether here or in Tokyo or Singapore, somebody always interrupts to tell the story of the cat, so I think I’d better follow custom and dispose of the Wood pussy. There are many versions of the story. It was twisted by Time a couple of years ago, and became a sort of feline Rin-Tin-Tin animal serial in the hands of the newspaper feature writers, who turned the cat into a permanent magician’s assistant and had it regularly doing its stunt whenever Wood called, “Pussy, pussy, come and clean the cobwebs”. It had, indeed, so many variants that I’m not sure Wood himself is any longer able to give a trustworthy account, and the cat cannot be interviewed because she’s dead. Yet what apparently actually happened is simple and easily told. The spectroscope had a long wooden tube, forty-two feet in length and six inches or so in diameter, projecting out through the side of the barn, to an iron post in the cowyard, fitted at one end with a diffraction grating and at the other with a slit and a mirror. During the first winter and spring after its construction, the spiders got in and wove their webs. When Wood came down in June he spied the arachnean invasion. He grabbed the family cat and stuck it — not without a struggle — into one end of the tube, which he then closed up. Pussy, having no alternative, squirmed her way through the tunnel towards the daylight and bounded out at the other end trailing a bridal veil of spiderwebs over the fence and across the lawn. It hadn’t occurred to the Professor that it would be long remembered, though he casually mentioned the episode in a technical paper in the Philosophical Magazine. It was just a quick, efficient, costless way of obtaining a desired result with whatever came nearest to hand.

This spectroscopic camera was a marvel of scientific — and practical — ingenuity. Friends, fellow-scientists, curiosity-seekers, and journalists again flocked to the now world-famous barn. There are many clippings, some highly technical, which describe what was going on there in 1912. The picture which comes clearest to me is the description which appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of Sunday, September 1, 1912, in which the writer said:

One passing along the road would never suspect that the place was other than a quaint building housing farm animals until the professor swings open the huge doors and shows you the interior.

The new spectroscope, which the professor built entirely himself, is essentially so simple a mechanism that one would hardly expect any startling results could be obtained from it. It consists of a long wooden tunnel, forty-two feet in length and seven inches square, terminating at one end in an achromatic lens, six inches in diameter, having a forty-two-foot focus, just the length of the tunnel. Beyond the lens, at the same end, is the diffracting grating which decomposes the light into the prismatic colors. This grating is a piece of polished metal ruled with diamond scratches, 15,000 to the inch, making a total of 75,000 vertical lines on the whole surface, which is five inches square.

The grating rotates on a vertical axis, turned by a rod and gearing wheel, so that the professor may use any part of the spectrum he wishes at a time. The instrument is so powerful that only a small part can be used at a time. The lines on the polished plate act just the same as a prism in diffracting or decomposing the light into the prismatic colors, but make the instrument much more powerful than an ordinary prism.