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

Mrs. Wood tells a story about the formal reception which formed a part of the program. The Crown Princess Maud was receiving in a small room which opened off the large hall, and the chamberlain told the Woods they would be taken in soon and presented. Wood was meanwhile introduced to the first lady in waiting, a beautiful and vivacious young Englishwoman, and Mrs. Wood says the chamberlain experienced great difficulty in prying Wood loose from her when the time came for presentation to the Crown Princess.

Wood had an absurd run-in with the German customs. Going to Stockholm he had taken along a suitcase crammed with glass bulbs, lenses, prisms, rubber tubes, and other odds and ends and gadgets for the lecture. When, on the return trip, they reached the German frontier at Malmö and were lined up at the customs barrier, Wood had to open it.

“Ach! Was haben Sie hier?”

Wood explained it had all been made in Germany and was the property of the University of Berlin; that he had taken it to Stockholm for a lecture and was returning it to the University. “That makes no difference”, said the guard. “You have duty to pay”. Wood argued, but to no avail.

The customs officer emptied the case, putting all the glass together, prisms, lenses, and bulbs in one lot, brass gadgets in another lot, rubber tubes in another; and then weighed each lot, noting the weights on a card. He then spent five or ten minutes looking up the rate on glass, brass, and rubber articles, and the quartz mercury lamp, and since he couldn’t properly classify this, about another quarter of an hour slipped by. Finally he added up the column, then added it again to make sure that no mistake had been made, and said triumphantly, “Na — Ja, ja, Sie haben was zu bezahlen! Sie bezahlen zwei Mark fünf und vierzig Pfennig". The English equivalent would be roughly, “You bet your life you have duty to pay! You pay two marks and forty-five pfennigs”. Sixty-two cents for three-quarters of an hour of an official’s misspent time.

Back in Berlin, Wood continued his research, in collaboration with Professor James Franck, subsequently a Nobel prize winner. They had previously worked together on the reduction of intensity of the iodine vapor in fluorescence caused by admixtures of chemically inert gases, and they now made the remarkable discovery that when helium gas was mixed with the iodine vapor, the spectrum of widely separated lines emitted by the vapor when illuminated by the green light of the mercury arc, which Wood had discovered a few weeks before, was transformed into a band spectrum of many hundreds of lines. The theoretical physicists, who occupied themselves with the problems connected with the radiation of atoms and molecules, were unable to find any plausible explanation for any of these effects, and it was not until many years later that they were completely understood, as will appear later. The research with Franck was completed in a couple of weeks, and the paper sent off to the English and German journals of physics.

The Woods next gathered up the family and went to St.- Moritz for Christmas and winter sports. Here Wood got on real skis for the first time, and would have nothing to do with sleds or skates. An ice rink, made by flooding a half-acre rectangle behind the hotel, had no attraction for him. He refused to take lessons, but watched the experts, and bought a book on Skiing without Tears or something of that sort, and at the end of the week could execute in low gear what he optimistically called a Telemark. At the end of the second week, high speed, without sharp turns or sudden stops, did not trouble him, and he had a great thrill, he says, “when, after a climb of over two hours up the mountain behind the village, with spots that called for ‘herring-boning,’ I came down against the wind and sun in one long, wild rush, immunized against terror by excitement, and like Mark Twain in his ‘Lost on the Mountain,’ finally found myself in the back yard of the hotel”.

From St.-Moritz the Woods went to Paris, and Wood started an investigation with an Englishman, Hemsalech, in the laboratory of the Sorbonne, on a new radiant emission from the spark which he had discovered in Baltimore. He also carried out some more accurate measurements of the iodine emission lines than he had been able to make in Berlin.