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

Presently, nevertheless, and despite some bickering over the division of the spoils, Wood and Train went into a similar collaboration on a sequel entitled The Moon-Maker, which was published serially by Cosmopolitan. A comet collides with an asteroid, knocks the latter out of its orbit, and sends it hurtling through space, so that it is presently going to hit Texas and destroy the world. Now who can better save the world than the bright young physicist (romanticized as Hooker in the former book), with the help of the daring young flyer named Burke? For, you see, they had learned in the previous opus to operate the “flying ring” and shoot the works. The ring is a sort of superrocket propelled by atomatic energy and armed with rays which can explode the asteroid or knock it for a series of loops. They had everything it took — except a heroine. If this had been going to take place in interstellar space exclusively, they might not have needed a heroine, but since they were concerned with its occurring also in Hearst’s Cosmopolitan, a heroine was essential. So Wood and Train invented a beautiful young lady named Rhoda Gibbs. She begins honestly enough as a precocious young mathematical assistant, but ends up as a stowaway “staff photographer” when the “flying ring” takes off — and to thicken the soup, Professor Hooker has fallen in love with her!

Hooker, Burke, another scientific guy thrown in for good measure, and the beautiful Rhoda presently take off and land to refuel on the moon, where she makes wonderful moon- landscape pictures. Later they meet and combat the asteroid. They partially explode it and drive it into an orbit in which it peacefully revolves around the earth — preventing our destruction and giving us a nice additional new moon!

It was in the bag, heroine, climax, check coming up from Cosmopolitan, and everything, and you might suppose that at this point our scientist astray as an author might have gone back into the Johns Hopkins laboratories and sat down. But not Wood!

While Train was polishing off Rhoda, Dr. Wood conceived the additional fantastic idea of illustrating this modem Jules Verne romance by concocting an actual set of photographs, as supposedly taken by the beautiful heroine. Train and the staff of Cosmopolitan were entranced by the idea, so Wood went to work in his East Hampton barn. He made plasticine models, did tricks with charcoal drawings and light, stole a croquet ball from the family set and painted it to represent the receding earth as seen through the camera lens of the departing Rhoda. He photographed it, as Rhoda would have had to do, through an infrared screen on a panchromatic plate. He modeled and photographed lunar landscapes, illuminated by oblique sunlight, showing the circular craters and volcanic peaks with their long shadows. When he wanted to show Burke or Rhoda walking in the foreground, in helmet, with oxygen tank, etc., he did it by using pictures of deep-sea divers in armor, cut from magazines. One really beautiful picture shows the “ring” high in the air with its blazing rocket tail over the lunar landscape. The sky in these photographs is inky black and studded with stars. The moon has no atmosphere and therefore no blue sky. He did ingenious photographs of the attack and partial destruction of the asteroid by the disintegrating ray, as if made through the window of the “flying ring”, as well as photographs of the collision of the comet and the asteroid taken through the great telescope on Mount Wilson, perfectly beautiful and scientifically accurate fakes.

Alas and alack, however, when the finished photos were shown to the editor in chief of Cosmopolitan, he threw up his hands in dismay and said, “I suppose they’re wonderful in their way — but they’re too wonderful — in their way, which is not our way. They’d make Cosmopolitan look like a copy of Popular Mechanics!”

Dr. Wood wants me not only to admire but to sympathize with his struggles, triumphs, and frustrations in the field of popular authorship. I can admire him and even envy him but I can’t see that he needs sympathy. Birds and Flowers now answers itself. Everybody knows he wrote it, and it’s doing fine. His name didn’t appear in gilt letters on the cover of The Man Who Rocked the Earth. He got only $300 for his part in its serialization, and Cosmopolitan refused to use his photos in the sequel… So what?

I honestly don’t believe it has ever occurred to the man that he was not only the creative originator, but the (thinly disguised) hero of both latter books, and that if they chance to survive the welter of interstellar pulp, he’ll cash in posthumously on his prophecies (as Jules Verne did long after he was dead), despite the fact that his name didn’t appear in gilt letters, through a “clerical error”!