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

Throughout all this time, Wood’s chief, General Russell, who had the military martinet’s horror of anything that savored of free-lancing, had been trying to hold Wood in one groove. He had sensed, however, the great importance of Langevin’s work, and had willingly let Wood give all the time he wanted to that. The Creusot gun works had asked the Bureau of Inventions for suggestions on a method to measure the pressure in high caliber guns, from point to point, as the shell traveled along the barrel. Wood suggested the insertion of piezoelectric cylinders of quartz, each of which would give out an electrical impulse of magnitude proportional to the applied pressure. This method is standard procedure today, and is generally ascribed to Sir J. J. Thomson, who developed it independently in England a year or two later. It was fortunate for pure science that General Russell gave Wood free rein with Langevin, for it led later to the important researches in supersonic vibrations which were carried out by Wood and Alfred Loomis in the latter’s laboratory at Tuxedo Park in 1927.

There was a good deal of shuttling of scientific and technical officers back and forth across the pond, and toward the end of the year Wood began to feel that he could obtain better laboratory facilities and consequently be more useful for a while back in America. So he applied for transfer, and arrived in New York in January, 1918.

He stopped in on Professor Michael Pupin of Columbia University, the great electromechanical wizard, who was working for the Navy on submarine detection. Pupin was interested in hearing of Wood’s work with Langevin and spent some time, with his staff, getting the details of the piezoelectric quartz vibrations.

He wanted Wood to work with them at their laboratories at Columbia and asked General Squier, Chief Signal Officer of the Army, if he might stay. But Squier refused. He wanted Wood to work in his own laboratory on his own ideas, realizing that he worked best as his own boss. As there was no use stifling the originality of a versatile man under mountains of Army red tape, Squier assigned him to detached service in Baltimore.

Here he developed the first device offered by the Science and Research Division which was actually put into production for use overseas. The Signal Corps of the army needed, among other things, a blinker-type signal which would not spread its beam so widely as to enable the enemy to read its messages. Their standard signaling lamp was something like an automobile spot lamp. It threw its beam far enough, but spread it so widely that there could be very little privacy at the receiving end. This made it impossible for the Army to use it in the trench warfare then in progress on the Western Front in France.

So Wood devised and made the “flash telescope”, a signaling device which projected a beam of light the width of which at a distance of a mile was less than ten feet. On looking into the eyepiece the distant landscape, highly magnified, and the minute coiled filament of the lamp were both seen in good focus. The telescope was aimed by bringing the point at which the signals were to be received, say, a window of a ruined house, into coincidence with the filament and then clamping the telescope on its tripod. The first model was made up of a piece of galvanized iron stovepipe, a six-volt auto lamp bulb (later replaced by special hydrogen-filled lamps which were made to cool quickly for quick flashes), a fairly good achromatic lens from an old projection lantern, and a good eyepiece.

Wood took it to Washington and showed it to General Squier. There it was tried out in the presence of officers of the Signal Corps; two of them stood ten feet apart, at a distance of a mile, and the lamp was clearly visible to one and not to the other. This old-junk lamp was sent over with some other apparatus and was demonstrated at the battle of Seicheprey, where it sent signals back to Divisional Headquarters at a distance of five kilometers from the front-line trenches during a German bombardment. An immense French signaling lamp had failed to make satisfactory contact at this range. Winchester, the American officer who took the Wood lamp over, established communication in five minutes after his arrival on the scene. Pershing immediately ordered a hundred of the new signaling lamps to be manufactured and sent over. They were wanted of course for signaling from the rear to front-line positions.