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

Wood still found time to enjoy himself. Before he left England, he went out to the great automobile race track at Brooklands for the races, where he also witnessed a stunt that set the aeronautical world agog. Pegoud, the French aviator, was to do his new and famous act in which he not only looped the loop “outside” as well as “inside”, but actually flew upside down for a quarter of a mile. “It was a lovely autumn day”, says Wood, “and the great stadium was packed. There came the hum of a motor high up in the air and we saw the tiny aeroplane with Pegoud’s helmeted head showing above the cockpit. A loop, another and another, and then the plane flying on a horizontal path, upside down with Pegoud’s inverted body hanging by the straps. The crowd of twenty thousand came to its feet with a gasp and a prolonged ‘A-a-ah.’ The plane dived again, turning over, and sailed along right side up with Pegoud now only a hundred feet above the ground waving to the cheering and shouting spectators”. Wood was tremendously pleased with the show, and later made amusing use of his impressions.

He joined his family in Paris, and they all spent the Christmas holidays again at St.-Moritz, stopping at the Kulm Hotel. Among the guests was a rich Rumanian, M. Stolojean, whose beautiful wife, Marna, was the daughter of Rumania’s War Minister, M. Filipesco.

Before dinner every night, M. Stolojean gave a cocktail party for his own group and invited the Woods. They got along famously. Marna, Wood says, wore a new dress and a new jewel every evening, and her husband had a pocketful of gold pieces, one of which he always left on the table after signing the card. There was bobsledding by day and dancing at night. The climax was to be a costume ball at Christmas. At lunch on the day of the ball Margaret asked her father whether he was planning to go and what he would wear.

I’ll let Wood tell the story, since it’s one he likes to remember.

I replied to Margaret, “I’m not going to pay a hundred francs to rent a harlequin pajama, or three hundred francs to be an Indian prince for a night”. But Margaret kept at me to go, and I finally said, “All right, I’ll come. I’ll come as Pegoud, upside down in an aeroplane”.

“Oh, marvelous, but how will you do it?”

“Well”, I said, “my head and shoulders will be in the pasteboard fuselage. Gnome motor and propeller in front, the wings supported by my extended arms, white gloves on my feet, and a huge Frenchman’s head, helmeted and goggled, and with a thick beard, all securely fastened on upside down on my behind”.

Gertrude said, “It won’t be funny, it’ll just look like you with a mask on your behind”. But I saw the picture in my mind’s eye, dashed down to the village, and bought yards of yellow cheesecloth, got an armful of thin bamboo sticks from my ski man and a lot of cardboard, and hurried back to the hotel. By forcing Gertrude, Margaret, and Elizabeth to sew vigorously all the afternoon, and gluing and painting cardboard myself, I had the whole contraption finished by six o’clock. It cost altogether less than three francs.

M. Stolojean came in to view it after the cocktails. He danced about in delight. “You shall have the first prize. Leave all to me”, he said. “I will arrange all; the floor shall be cleared after the fourth dance, you are to stay in my room until the band strikes up the Marseillaise, I will have a claque by the door, and there will be shouts of Il vient Pegoud! Vive Pegoud! Pegoud comes! and you tear across the hall and dance a pas seul!”

“Great”, I said. “I’ll do stunts, spirals, sideslips, everything”. We’d had some cocktails. “I’ll do my celebrated whirling dervish act, in which I spin for over a minute and then walk a chalk line”.

It came off exactly as planned, and there was tumultuous applause as I did a sideslip through the door, and shrieks of laughter as I turned and the face and beard came into view. With the band crashing the Marseillaise with an enthusiasm created by many gold pieces, and the huge waxed floor completely deserted, the walls packed with standing spectators, I did things I did not imagine possible in the way of stunts. That the illusion was fairly good, I found out the next morning when shown photographs, one of which appeared the next week in the London Sketch. Later I was able to dance with the ladies, for I had constructed the wings in such a way that I could wrap them around my partner, enveloping her in the manner of a bat doing a bunny hug with a white mouse. At the end of the party, the drum rolled for silence, and the master of ceremonies, a retired English colonel, arose to announce the prizes.