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

It’s sad enough when we read that treatment of this sort turned Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith testy. When it happens to Wood, who innocently “strayed” into poetic and literary fields, I suppose I should break down and cry — but I don’t. I’ll be damned if I’ll sympathize with any amateur author whose poetry ran into nineteen editions and whose pseudoscientific sensations were published in the biggest popular magazines in America.

Chapter Thirteen.

Wood Tunes in on the World War — Invents New Methods of Warfare, Including Trained Seals to Chase Submarines

While Wood was in Europe, in the autumn of 1913, he was invited to become a member of the Solvay Conference of the International Physical Institute which was meeting in Brussels. There were present about thirty eminent scientists, among them Einstein, Sir James Jeans, Lindeman, Rutherford, Rubens, Langevin — and Madame Curie. Madame Curie was the only woman, and at the opening of the congress she requested that the others refrain from smoking, as she disliked the smell of tobacco. Since the Institute had provided for each member a box of Havana cigars, her request was unpopular. At the second session, Wood (having meanwhile plotted with Professor Jeans) took out his pipe and lit it. Jeans followed suit, then one by one the other members helped themselves to cigars. Wood says Madame Curie rose, gathered her papers, and departed.

At about this time Wood bought by chance a little headphone radio — or “wireless receiving set” as it was called in those days. The day when they’d bring voices and music and be a fixture in every home was still in the far distant future. There was nothing to pick up from the Eiffel Tower station, or from anywhere, except Morse code. Nobody had receiving sets except cranks and scientists. How Wood acquired one, learned code, kept the gadget, brought it home to America, and “tuned in” privately on the World War before either the public or the newspapers got it can best be told in his own words.

We lived in an apartment on the Avenue Charles Floquet almost in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. One day on the way to the Sorbonne I had passed an electric shop and saw a little galena headphone radio set in the window. There was a sign suggesting that you could use this set to listen to the Eiffel Tower radio station. So I thought it might be fun to learn code and I bought it.

An invalid friend of mine, a brother of S. S. McClure, who also lived at 14 Avenue Charles Floquet, worked with me, and in time we both learned to read Morse code. I bought him a set. We used to practice sending and receiving together. Mrs. McClure said she thought it saved his life. Signals came in from the Eiffel Tower with such strength that you could often see a spark between the cat whisker and the galena crystal on my receiving set.

When I got home — that must have been about the end of June, 1914 — I decided I might as well keep on with code practice if I didn’t want to forget it, and I installed a set at East Hampton, just about the same as the one I had in Paris, but with 150-foot antennas. Messages began coming in with good strength from Wellfleet on Cape Cod and from the German Telefunken station at Sayville, Long Island.

A few days before the outbreak of war, early in August, I was recording letters one at a time, as they came in, without realizing what it was all about, as is usual with novices. The message stopped suddenly, and I found I had written, “To all German ships at sea. England has declared war on Germany. Proceed at once to the nearest German port. On no account touch at French or English ports”. And then the Telefunken call letter signing off. This message was repeated at intervals during the day and night. I wondered why these messages were always in English. After war was declared, messages continued to come in from Telefunken, usually in English, addressed to the German cruisers Dresden and Karlsruhe, and this kept up for three or four weeks after the war had begun. We wondered then why the government permitted the sending of these messages from an American station. Later on the government put a stop to it.

There were a lot of messages in a strange code coming from Telefunken, with words like “Cuckoo Buffano” and “Ciro Teliko”. These words came in so frequently that I still remember them.

War news used to come in from Wellfleet and Telefunken (until it was closed down), and we got the latest news at East Hampton long before the newspapers reached us. People got into the habit of calling me up at all hours of the day and night — even drunks on the way home from dances would drive into our yard and wake me up shouting, “Hey, Prof, what’s the latest from Europe?”

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