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

You might think this one alarming if successful excursion in the field of popular authorship would have been enough for any busy laboratory scientist — but not for Wood! He was infected. It’s like malaria and danghi. The bug had bitten him, and by early 1914 he was being an author again in his misguided moments, with results which were equally extraordinary, in their different way… for the scandalous genealogical truth, stemming down from the Verne-Wells family tree, is that Wood was the American grandfather and Arthur Train the grandmother of the present flood of pseudo-scientific fiction which fills the pulp magazines and sometimes the slicks with interstellar catastrophes and journeys in moon rockets — and the comics with Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.

Back in 1914 Arthur Train was spending the summer at East Hampton, and dropped in frequently to see Wood, in the barn laboratory. They were both Jules Verne addicts, and one day Wood said to him, “I’ve got a swell plot for a story”. He sketched the outline of a tale in which, during the middle of a world war, messages come from a mysterious unknown wireless station warning the powers that unless they stop the war the sender, who signs himself “Pax”, will shift the orientation of the earth’s axis by the aid of his disintegrating ray and atomic power and cause a second Ice Age in which all northern Europe will be covered by glaciers and destroyed. Regarded as a harmless crank, “Pax” finally broadcasts a message that, to show his power, he will, on the twelfth of March at noon, lengthen the day by five minutes. The time arrives, and what happens is described by a common citizen sitting in Central Park contemplating the obelisk.

There is a godawful thundering rumble, the ground quivers, the obelisk crashes to earth, and the skyscrapers sway back and forth. Newspaper extras report terrific earthquakes all over the world, and next morning dispatches from the Greenwich and other observatories report that the stars are two and a half minutes late in crossing the meridian. Later dispatches state that the period of the earth’s rotation has been increased by three minutes.

Reproduced from How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers by Robert Williams Wood with permission of the publishers, Dodd, Mead and Company.

Then comes the episode of a “relay” gun that shells Paris from a distance of seventy miles. This was three years before the Big Bertha. Presently a “flying ring” driven by atomic power in rocket form roars over Europe, directing its rays against the ground, which is torn to bits. Crossing the Mediterranean, it causes a tidal wave that swamps everything in its path.

The mad pacifist genius is finally located in Labrador by Professor Benjamin Hooker, a young Harvard physicist (Wood himself, of course, romanticized), who discovers the secret of the disintegrating ray. Uranium ore was the key to it, which was curiously prophetic, in the best Jules Verne tradition, of the present experiments with neutron rays generating atomic power from uranium. Hooker is rescued and aided by a famous and daring young aviator named Burke, and together they bring about the destruction of the earth-destroying plot. If I recall correctly, “Pax” blew himself up by overloading his disintegrator.

“Arthur Train was enthusiastic”, says Wood, “but we worried for days about the title. Then one morning I said to him, “I’ve got it! The Man Who Rocked the Earth”.

The story was written speedily in collaboration. Wood wrote the scientific and pseudoscientific passages and worked on the mechanical plot, while Train took care of the “literary” and human-interest elements. It ran serially in the Saturday Evening Post, and was published as a book by Doubleday, Page & Company in 1915. The title page acknowledges the joint authorship, but Wood was sore (and small blame to him) because they left his name off the gilt-lettered cover. He promptly complained, and Doubleday, Page made a handsome if hollow apology. They told the poor prof a pretty bedtime story. The omission was due, they wrote — and were so sorry — “to a clerical error”!