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

In the early spring Wood and his wife made a trip to Sicily, and it was here, when the almond blossoms were pinkest, that he made his best and most striking infrared photographs, which were exhibited at the annual exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society a little later and published in the Illustrated London News. They stayed at the Hotel Politi in Syracuse, perched on the brink of the deep quarries of Latomia, in which the hundreds of Athenian prisoners were confined and starved to death after the defeat of Alcibiades by the Syracusians in 414 B.C.. In these quarries Wood made some striking infrared photographs.

I was intrigued greatly (says Wood) by seeing what purported to be the tomb of Archimedes. Reading in boyhood in my father’s old copy of Arnott’s physics about the screw pump for raising water, invented by Ar-kimmy-des (as I always pronounced it), I had constructed one by winding a long piece of lead pipe in a spiral around an old rolling pin from the kitchen closet. History says Archimedes set little value on his mechanical inventions, regarding them as beneath the dignity of pure science, but they were the things that appealed to the popular imagination and have kept his name alive after a lapse of over two thousand years — rather than his contributions to geometry and mathematics.

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Wood also is annoyed sometimes when his electrical thaw, his fish-eye views, his color photography process, and other mechanical inventions are stressed in the newspapers as his major achievements.

From Sicily they went to London early in May, 1911, where Wood had been invited to give one of the “Friday evening discourses” at the Royal Institution, founded in 1799 by Count Rumford.

The Friday evening discourses dated back to the time of Sir Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday (whose experiments with electric currents laid the foundations for modern electrical engineering). They were of a semipopular nature, but were full-dress affairs, attended almost exclusively by prominent figures in scientific fields accompanied by their ladies. The lecture hall and its horseshoe-shaped lecture table were the same as they had been when Blaikley did his admirable painting showing Faraday behind the table on which his crude little coils and magnets are displayed, delivering a Friday evening lecture, on December 27, 1855. Wood had often seen the picture, and as a young instructor at Madison had possibly dreamed of one day standing behind this same lecture table, covered with his fluorescent tubes and bulbs, his ultraviolet lamps, electric sparks, and other scientific paraphernalia. Now his dream was coming true.

After the audience is seated (says Wood) there comes a hush in the conversation, and the lecturer and his family, if present, are ushered into the room through a door, previously closed and guarded, behind and a little to one side of the lecture table.

His Grace, the Duke of Northumberland, not being available at the time, Gertrude entered the hall on the arm of the Right Honorable Earl Cathcart, Vice-President, followed by my daughter Margaret, on the arm of diminutive Sir William Crookes, who came nearly up to her shoulder and whose long white mustache, waxed at the ends into two sharp spikes, fascinated her. I brought up the rear. There was a brief introduction and at last I was standing behind the famous lecture table, giving my talk on the recent experiments I had made with invisible light…