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

He took the thinnest salt plate they had and ground it against a sheet of ground glass, slightly moistened with water, until it was about half a millimeter thick. This was all that was required, but the thinner the better, so Wood thought he’d see if he could go further. Attaching the plate to a match stick with sealing wax, he dipped it into a glass of warm water and dried it quickly with absorbent cotton. It was slightly thinner, and the “ground” surface had become polished and transparent. He dipped it in the water and looked at it again (as did the Hatter at the mad tea party). It was still thinner. One more dip proved to be the limit, as the plate showed evidences of going to pieces at one corner.

Rubens breezed into the room, having finished his lecture. “Well”, he said, “and can you make us the salt plate?” “Yes”, said Wood. “It’s finished”.

“And how thick is it?”

“One tenth of a millimeter”, said Wood, who had just finished measuring it.

Early in December the Woods were invited to attend the festivities in Stockholm in connection with the awarding of the Nobel prizes, and Wood was invited to deliver a lecture there on his recent researches in optics.

While carrying on the research with Rubens, he had also been investigating the optical properties of iodine. This had led to a capital discovery which was the small but solid foundation upon which he built later on one of his most important and elaborate series of discoveries, described in numerous papers under the general title of “Resonance Spectra of Iodine”, investigations that occupied him for several succeeding years and eventually, when theory caught up with experiment, were of considerable importance in unraveling the mystery of band spectra. The discovery came about in this way: having been struck, in some of his earlier work, by the similarity of the absorption spectra of sodium and iodine vapors and having prepared some glass bulbs containing iodine vapor for the purpose of studying its fluorescence and passing through one of the rooms in which a quartz mercury arc lamp of great intensity was burning, it occurred to him that possibly the iodine vapor might yield resonance spectra similar to those which he had observed and studied under such difficulties in the case of sodium. He borrowed a small hand spectroscope, set up a large lens, and formed an image of the arc on one of his bulbs. Splendid! A bright cone of fluorescent light inside of the bulb. Pointing the spectroscope at the bulb he observed a resonance spectrum far simpler and more clearly cut than any he had found with sodium, a series of bright lines, spaced with the precision of the graduations on a foot rule, extending from the green line of mercury up through the yellow-orange to the extreme red. This observation was made only a few days before his invitation to Stockholm, so he had a very young “baby” to show at his lecture.

What impressed Wood most on arrival in Stockholm was that it offered no facilities for taking a bath, although there were plenty of places where one could be given a bath. You were placed stark naked on an ironing board and scrubbed with excelsior, like a puppy, by a muscular Swedish woman. The Woods were entertained at dinner by the American Ambassador and his wife, who told Gertrude they had had a bathtub installed in their house, but found that the plumber had put the valves that controlled the hot and cold water flow on the other side of the room from the tub. When they protested that they would have to get out of the tub every time they wanted to change or adjust the temperature, they were told they “could ring for the maid”!

At the huge banquet which followed the handing out of the Nobel prizes, Gertrude was seated at the head table next to Emmanuel Nobel, a nephew of the inventor of dynamite who had founded the prizes. He told her he was just back from St. Petersburg and had brought with him an enormous earthen crock of the finest caviar, a gift from the Czar to the King. “All I could take back as a gift to the Czar”, he said, “would be a box of dynamite — and that, I’m afraid, wouldn’t be very acceptable

When the day came for his lecture, Wood performed a number of what Professor Lorentz, the famous Dutch physicist, had once designated “his beautiful and convincing experiments on the blackboard”, making pictures for his audience of everything he was talking about. It diverted them, he said, and kept them from going to sleep. They must have been well diverted, for the Woods continued to be showered with invitations.

A luncheon was given them by Professor Mittag-Loeffler at his beautiful country home. He was the Chairman of the Nobel Committee, was in Berlin in the autumn, and had extended the invitation to the Woods to come to Stockholm. He was proud of his library, said to be the finest collection of books on mathematics in the world. It was housed in a huge tower, ascended by a great spiral stairway.