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

One day I ran into a young man who had an amethyst crystal which he said he had found in a quarry. It contained two cavities filled with liquid, clear as water, in each of which a small air bubble moved to and fro when you turned the crystal sideways. I had heard of quartz crystals containing moving bubbles but had never seen one, and this was an amethyst with bubbles! Was there another in the whole world, I wondered. He wanted five dollars for it, and I wanted it more than I had ever wanted anything in my life. I teased and teased my father to let me get it, not in my mother’s hearing, however, but he thought the price was a little high, and he was a little doubtful, I think, about the air bubbles moving around in a liquid in the crystal. The young man lived in Boston, and my father said, “You tell him to bring the crystal out here and let me see it.” So one evening the young man appeared with his crystal. He would not, however, come down in his price, and my father after demurring for some time finally handed out a five-dollar bill and I pocketed the crystal. “Don’t tell your mother how much we paid for it,” he said. I still have the amethyst and the moving bubbles are still there.

During my early boyhood we always spent a part of each summer at Kennebunkport. That was in the days when you drove over from Kennebunk in an old stagecoach, and there were always one or more schooners in process of construction along the river. One summer I invented the game of writing a note and putting it in a glass bottle tied to a long spar or boom, to be towed out to sea by a paper kite when there was an offshore wind. The note requested the finder to return the paper with a statement as to where the bottle had been picked up. (One was actually returned by a native of Nantucket!) When the wind was not directly offshore, I found that by putting the nail to which the kite string was fastened two or three feet aft the forward end of the spar, it would sail straight out to sea, with the kite flying 45° or more on the quarter. It was a thrilling sight in a strong wind to see the spar or log rushing through the water like a torpedo with no visible means of propulsion and with a “bone in its teeth.” I often wondered what the crews of passing ships thought of it when encountering it, the kite string being invisible except at close quarters.

Then came astronomy, one of my father’s friends having lent me a very fine five-inch glass telescope, and I was out every clear night. I took no interest in the constellations or their names. This was like analyzing flowers. But I was fascinated by watching the moons of Jupiter as they circled around the planet, casting their shadows occasionally on the disk, the craters and mountains on the moon, Saturn’s rings, and the nebulae.

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About his early formal education — to get back to chronology — his mother, with Harvard as the later goal, had hoped that Robert could enter Roxbury Latin School at the age of twelve, and he evidently wasn’t going to be able to if he remained at Mrs. Walker’s. So she had taken him out and sent him to Miss Weston’s School, in Roxbury. To his mother’s joy, and perhaps surprise, he had managed to “get by” at Miss Weston’s, and entered Roxbury Latin. His entrance was deceptively triumphant. He had appeared with other applicants. The principal of the historic school, the redoubtable William C. Collar, commonly called “Dickie,” stood before the applicants with a sheaf of papers in his hands. Rob feared that he had failed again or that if he squeezed through he would be at the bottom of the list of those admitted. Then Dr. Collar began reading, and read:

“The first boy admitted is Robert Williams Wood.”

Dr. Collar had been intending to read the list of admissions alphabetically, rather than for merit, but in fumbling the papers had got the list reversed.

Rob’s auspicious but deceptive place at Roxbury Latin was soon rectified. He fell at once to the bottom of the class and remained there through the whole first year. During the first few weeks of the following year his place in the class was near the top, but he soon forged his way back to the bottom and was dropped at the end of the second year.