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

We had practically no science at school, though they had something they called botany at Mrs. Walker’s when I was about eight or nine years old. I hated it and did very badly in it — as in everything else. It consisted of something they called analyzing flowers. A flower was laid on your desk and you were supposed to find its name by looking it up in the botany book, in which the various parts of every flower, calyx, corolla, stamen, pistil, et cetera, had been classified in tables. You would find the top of a vertical column and then follow it down to the proper horizontal column, where you would find a reference to another page of tables, in which the process was repeated. You would eventually come out with the name of the flower in the end, if you knew how and had made no mistakes. It interested me about as much as crossword puzzles do at the present time. I did become interested at the age of nine or ten, however, playing what I suppose now would be called plant physiology, planting an acorn or a bean, and after it had got well started on its way to the surface, turning it upside down to see what would happen, putting pollen from a pear tree on the pistil of an apple blossom, and other strange experiments in cross fertilization. I learned to cut twigs from the trees in winter, and put them in jars of water in the sunshine and watch the buds swell and the leaves come out; watered plants with red ink to see if the white blossoms would turn pink; planted seeds in a flowerpot, covered with a plate of glass and placed in the sun, and was charmed to note that when I lifted the glass and sniffed, it smelled exactly like Sturtevant’s greenhouse next door. My father gave me a very fine microscope and Carpenter’s large volume on microscopy. This started me on excursions in which specimens were brought home from brooks and pools, in glass jars, to be examined under the microscope. Microscopy was a “science” in those days, the science of anything small. Even today, there is a Royal Microscopical Society in England, of which I am an honorary member. I mounted slides and had a large exchange list with other enthusiasts, having correspondents in practically every state. At one time I was mailing living aquatic specimens in small bottles of water in exchange for mounted preparations.

My father believed in teaching me the value of money by making me “earn” my spending cash from earliest childhood[2].

We had about an acre of ground behind our house at Jamaica Plain which was utilized as a vegetable garden. Finding out that the local butcher sold small sprigs of mint to his customers, for fifteen cents, I had my father arrange with him to get his supply from me. We had a small mint bed in the garden for our own use, but by transplanting and spreading it out I succeeded in producing a most luxuriant bed about ten feet square. Every morning before breakfast I used to run down the hill to the butcher shop by the railroad station with a magnificent bunch of fragrant cuttings, for which he paid me five cents. From this he could easily make fifteen or twenty bunches of the size which he sold for three times the money. The tasks which I most disliked were picking potato bugs from the vines and digging up dandelions in the lawn which surrounded the house. But from these sources I derived most of my income. My earliest expenditures were chiefly for rubber bands to make slingshots, and mineral specimens purchased at the natural history store in Boston, for my collection of minerals. Later on my purchases included chemicals and materials for making fireworks. My father gave me a geological hammer, armed with which I scoured the quarries in the vicinity of Boston for minerals and fossils. These, together with the specimens that I bought from time to time, eventually made quite a sizable collection.

The expedition which caused me the greatest excitement was a trip which I made to Braintree on my bicycle to the world- famous quarry where the giant trilobites, Paradoxides harlani, are found. It’s curious how you remember the scientific names of ace specimens in your collection. I had read somewhere a fantastic story about these trilobites, that they were not found anywhere else in the world, and that some scientific romancer had propounded the theory that they might have been brought to the earth on a meteorite. I secured such a heavy bagful of them that it was only with great difficulty that I could mount to the seat of my high-wheeled bicycle.