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

The morning after the lecture I was back at the rooms of the Institution, removing my apparatus and putting away in the glass cases such things as I had borrowed. Spying the largest Nicol polarizing prisms that I had ever seen, I asked Sir James Dewar, the director, if I could use them for a study of the polarization of the lines of my newly discovered resonance spectrum of iodine. It was of immense importance to discover if, when the fluorescence spectrum was excited by polarized light of a single color, such as the green line of the mercury arc, any or all of the eighteen lines of the fluorescent spectrum were also polarized. Dewar gave me a nice room to work in and everything that I required. It was going to be a tough job, needing a huge amount of polarized light, large mirrors, and lenses for concentrating it on the bulb containing the iodine vapor, and the big Nicol prisms for polarizing the light. Bulbs had disadvantages, and I adopted a long glass tube of good size with a bulb blown on one end and the other end drawn down like a cow’s horn, bent off to one side and painted black. This served as a dead black background against which the fluorescence could be viewed through the bulb without disturbing reflections from the glass wall. I employed two very powerful quartz mercury arcs, one above and the other to one side of the tube, a huge concave mirror behind each lamp, and two large condensing lenses between the lamps and the tube. The research was completed in a week; all of the lines were found to be strongly polarized and there were excellent photographs showing the dark bands, which indicated polarization, cutting across all of the lines. A twelve-page paper, illustrated with photographs, appeared in the Philosophical Magazine shortly afterwards. This was the fastest work that I had ever done, which was a piece of good luck, for on the day on which I had written finis to it, Dewar strolled in with his hands behind his back under the tails of his frock coat and told me gruffly, as was his habit sometimes, that I’d have to vacate my room, since Marconi was giving the next Friday evening discourse and would need it for setting up and trying out his experiments. “I’m finished”, I said, “and thank you very much”.

It was advertised that at Marconi’s lecture the audience would be able to listen to transatlantic signals coming from Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. This was at a time when some still doubted such a feat was possible.

Kites would be flown from the roof carrying the antenna, and the audience would be able to hear signals by a system of telephones distributed over the auditorium. Days before the lecture, the historic halls of the Institution were invaded by workmen moving in Marconi’s apparatus. They took down the iron balustrade of the marble stairway leading to the second story, which interfered with the hoisting of some of the larger and heavier pieces of electrical equipment to the lecture room. The entrance hall was cluttered with packing boxes and excelsior for three days, and gradually there was assembled, behind the semicircular lecture table on which Faraday had set up his little coils and magnets, such a display of impressive modern electrical appliances as one seldom sees outside a World’s Fair. A great marble switchboard with voltmeters, ammeters, rheostats, inductances, etc., etc.; several mysterious- looking polished mahogany boxes, with shining brass knobs and bars; and many other things in between these. During the afternoon preceding the lecture Marconi’s two young assistants were on the roof of the Institution, raising the tandem of great kites and tuning the receiving instruments.

This interested me enormously, as I had been playing with kites at East Hampton, and I injected myself into the party, asking questions, making suggestions, getting in their way, and making other equally ineffectual efforts to help.

Marconi read his lecture from manuscript, his elbow on the reading desk and his forehead resting on his hand. He appeared to be the least interested person in the auditorium in what he had to say, and there were no experiments. Except that towards the end of his reading he said, “I have installed the apparatus here with which the signals are transmitted and you will hear the sound of the spark discharge in this box when I close the switch”. He opened and closed it several times and we heard “Buz-buz-buz, Buzzzz-buzzzz-buzzzz, buz-buz-buz” (SOS).

About ten minutes before the end of the hour I noticed that his assistants were getting nervous. They were “off stage”, and one of them kept disappearing every few minutes, then reappearing for a hurried whispered conversation. I tiptoed over to find out what was wrong. The transatlantic signals were coming in all right, but the wind was dropping and the kites were coming down.

“Tell Marconi”, I whispered. “Let the audience hear them while they can and then finish the lecture”.