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

As they reached the head of the dock, a British sergeant who was washing his face in a basin in front of a British barracks looked at them with a grin, and, making a trumpet of his hands, bawled out in a voice that could be heard at the extreme end of the barracks, “Jesus Christ! Look who’s here!” The Americans, saving what little face they had left, passed on looking straight ahead, pretending they had not heard him.

A little further on they passed a detachment of British soldiers who were escorting a squad of German prisoners from the docks to the barbed-wire barricades. Several German officers were among them, and as they passed the group, they heard one officer say in German to his companions, “I wish I could take one of them home with me for a souvenir”. Wood had neglected to obtain authorization to report directly to the French Bureau of Inventions which had asked through the State Department to have him commissioned and sent over. Had he not neglected this, it would have freed him from a lot of red tape. As it was, he was forced to report to the Chief Signal Officer of the A.E.F., General Russell, then in Chaumont. But he managed, partly by playing hooky, to get in touch and keep in touch with most of his internationally uniformed professorial colleagues — with the other “sheep in wolves’ clothing”.

Here now comes a lot of unadulterated Wood, concerning what war research was — and probably still is today — among scientists and physicists. It presents a sad and at the same time stimulating picture.

Says Wood:

Along with the really valuable research that was going on there was a lot of futile or crazy war research, very technical, most of which never amounted to anything. I was continually reminded of Gulliver’s voyage to the island of Laputa, where crazy scientists were working on crazy problems.

The laboratories of the Sorbonne, École normale, Collège de France, and other institutions of learning in Paris were peopled by scientists, old and young, most of them in the horizon-blue uniforms of the French Army, puttering around on things to make war simpler, faster, or more frightful.

Captain Bougier was working on a device for determining the direction from which hostile aircraft were approaching by causing the sound vibrations falling on two widely separated horns to vibrate two light mirrors mounted at right angles to each other; a beam of light reflected from one mirror to the other and then to a screen traced a more or less complicated curve known to physicists for the past half century as a Lissajous figure, from the shape of which the direction of the source of the sound could be determined. I made a slight improvement in this apparatus by placing the mirrors closer together and viewing a minute source of light directly in the second mirror. The French now needed an instrument imitating the sound of an airplane for testing these and other direction finders. I said, “Why not use an old airplane?” (This same problem came up years later in the broadcasting studios. The sound-effect experts had spent fruitless days in searching for something that would imitate the sound of an opening or closing door, and finally agreed that the only thing that would imitate the sound perfectly was a door; in every studio you now see a little door about three feet square, with handle and latch complete, on a frame which rolls on rubber- tired wheels. Opening and shutting this does the trick.) Some objection was raised against this obvious solution, and I constructed in a half hour or so a horn made by separating the trumpet and sound box of a “Strombos” auto horn, operated by compressed carbon dioxide, and inserting a brass tube about three feet long between the parts. This, when operated by the compressed gas, produced a low note of about 120 vibrations a second, and imitated the low hum of an airplane quite perfectly. They liked this very much, as it could be carried anywhere under the arm. When operated in the laboratory the effect was very peculiar. Stationary waves were produced. At some places its roar was very loud, and at other places only a few feet away there was almost complete silence. We used to poke it out of the window at noon and turn it loose, and the crowds going to lunch down the “Boul. Mich”. would stop and gaze skyward in alarm. (This was the progenitor of the subaudible horn I made later for John Balderston for stage effect.)