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

They shook their heads. “Impossible”, one whispered. “They are to come at the end. He would be furious if we interrupted him”.

“Let me do it then”, I said. But they would have none of it.

The lecture went on monotonously, and came to an end with the words: “We shall now listen to the signals coming across the Atlantic”. He turned to his assistants who were standing at the side of the auditorium. They shook their heads, sadly, and one said, “The kites are down”.

Marconi turned to the audience and explained that the failure of the wind had made the demonstration impossible. To me it sounded as if he were slightly pleased to be saved the trouble.

Walking out with Lord Rayleigh after the lecture, I said, “What did you think of it?”

“Well”, he replied, “I feel disposed to think that if you or I had required something for a lecture that would make a buzz- buzz we could have accomplished it with simpler apparatus — and we’d have had the buzz-buzz”.

* * *

The Woods now picked up Elizabeth and Robert, Jr., and sailed for home on the maiden trip of the Olympic, then the largest passenger steamer afloat.

After returning to America in 1911, and while continuing, of course, in his post at Johns Hopkins, Wood started a series of experiments with Professor Pickering of the Harvard Observatory on a new method of determining velocity of stars by photographing their spectra with an objective prism. These were very dramatic and involved the photography of entire groups of stars through a filter consisting of a glass cell filled with liquid — a solution of a chemical with the beautiful name of neodymium. This gave an additional absorption line in the spectrum of each star, from which calculations could be made of stellar velocities as stars approached or receded from the earth.

This was one of Wood’s great contributions to astrophysics, a subject in which he has figured prominently ever since. The Wood-Pickering procedure continues to be used as one of the standard methods of measuring stellar velocity — though Wood today has a new method brewing which Harlow Shapley and other prominent astronomers believe may supersede all previous systems.

In the summer of 1911, Wood purchased and mounted at East Hampton a parabolic mirror of sixteen-inch aperture and twenty-six-foot focus, which he had arranged in conjunction with a large coelostat lent by the Naval Observatory. The coelostat mirror, turned by clockwork, followed the moon and kept the reflected beam horizontal and directed against the sixteen-inch concave mirror, which in turn formed an image of the moon at its focus near the coelostat where the plateholder and ultraviolet filter were mounted. Young Professor Masamichi Kimura, of Tokyo, who ranks today among Japan’s greatest living scientists, had come over to study and work with Wood on sodium vapor, and was invited to East Hampton to help with the moon photography.

During their work a curious episode occurred. Kimura had been a welcome and popular house guest for a week end, and later was residing in a near-by hotel while they continued their summer experiments. One evening they’d been planning to photograph the moon with ultraviolet light. They had set up the telescope and mirrors in the late afternoon in a field clear of buildings, out beyond the barn, and Wood said, “Come over at eight o’clock”.

The sky was clear, but between six and seven a heavy pea- soup fog rolled in from the ocean. It was summertime, but the fog was cold as well as thick. The Woods, who had been dining early, saved after-dinner coffee for Kimura and expected him to appear at the house any minute. He did not appear. About nine o’clock the fog began to roll away, and the sky cleared. A blanket of it, however, as it sometimes does toward Montauk Point, lay thick, waist-deep on the ground. Wood waded through it toward the telescope, planning to do the photography alone. As he approached the looming shelters that covered the mirrors, he saw another dark object embedded in the fog. It was the head and shoulders of the Japanese, sphinxlike in the clear, with the rest of him up to his elbows in the murk.

“Gosh”, said Wood, “how long have you been here?”

Kimura took out his watch, consulted it in the moonlight, and said, “Hoh, have been here one hour and twenty-two minutes”.

Wood doesn’t guess at the answer. Kimura was an extremely intelligent and popular fellow, and knew from experience that he was always welcome at the fireside.