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 Joins the Army as a "Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing” and Becomes "a Hell of a Major” Overseas

Sheep in wolves’ clothing” is the name Wood applied to himself and other professors and scientists who were given commissions and uniforms in the World War. Long before we entered it, he’d been helping the War Department with technical advice, and he kept trying in vain to get his friend General Squier, Chief Signal Officer of our Army, to give him a commission and send him overseas. Then came a cable from Paris to the State Department, rubber-stamped by Prime Minister Ribot, requesting that Wood be commissioned and sent to Paris to work in collaboration with the French scientific group that formed the Bureau of Inventions.

“I was in East Hampton at the time”, said Wood, and though I (the biographer) have taken two or three shots at trying to tell what happened next, I think it’s best and safest to let him go on telling it in his own way.

I had to go down to Washington (says Wood) to take my medical examination and go through all the formalities. I irritated the Medical Corps sergeant who was testing me on eyesight. When he was giving me the test for color blindness and took out a box of different colored pieces of yarn, he produced a red piece and asked me, “What’s this?” I answered, “Worsted”. But in spite of this, I managed to finish the physical examination and returned to East Hampton to await orders. After I had been there awhile, I received a communication from the War Department ordering me to report to Washington again for a mental examination.

I thought this a bit strange, especially as the head of the Signal Corps, for which I was being examined, was General Squier, an old Johns Hopkins man, who should, I thought, be able to vouch for my mental qualifications. So I wrote a letter to Squier. This was answered by some captain who told me in rather brusque terms to do as I was ordered. Squier said afterwards, “You should have written to me at my apartment. I never even saw your letter”.

This meant another trip to Washington, where the temperature was something like 101° in the shade. At the end of this rather long and expensive trip, I presented myself in front of a fat man, who gave me a mental examination, which, as I remember, consisted of the following dialogue:

Q. “What is your name?”

A. “Robert W. Wood”.

Q. “What is your occupation?”

A. “Professor of Physics at Johns Hopkins University”. “That’s all”, he said, completing the record.

This whole business naturally irritated me a good deal.

* * *

The irritation, as Dr. Wood realized and faithfully mentions, was mutual. I am informed from other sources that after the door had closed on him, an unhappy sergeant said, “I don’t care whether he’s the greatest scientist on earth, he’s going to make a hell of a major! I’d hate like hell to be his colonel”. I don’t know how much his colonel suffered, but quite a while later in the palatial diner on the Blue Train going up from Toulon and Marseille — according to Dr. Hugh Young, who was present — Major Wood was invited to meet General Pershing for the first time and have coffee with him. The commander in chief inquired what outfit Wood was with, and Wood is said to have replied, “Well, I suppose I’m what you would call a sort of free lance”. “And just what are you doing?” Pershing asked. And Wood is reported to have replied, “Well, sir, it’s supposed to be a secret, but I don’t think there’d be any harm in letting you in on it”.

Wood had obtained his major’s commission promptly as red tape went and was soon rigged out in a fine new Rogers Peet uniform. Robert Wood, Jr., a student at Harvard in 1915, had gone to France as a volunteer in the American Ambulance Field Service, had had himself transferred, became an artillery officer with the French, won the Croix de guerre, was gassed, and recovered. There are doubtless many cases of father and son who both served as officers overseas, but these two happened to be the first I’d ever met, and I enjoy it when they exchange reminiscences of those old days. They don’t do it often — and when they do, they usually get into violent arguments.