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

Winchester also took over with him a very dark red signal light invented by Wood. Its signals could be received in daylight only by field glasses equipped with special dark red filters. Another lamp developed by the Baltimore Station projected a beam through an ultraviolet filter, which could be received only on a special phosphorescent screen. These last two lamps so intrigued Signal Corps officers in France that they insisted they be incorporated in the original lamp, and it was this which resulted in so complicating its construction that the job was not finished until just before the armistice.

Although of no practical use to American troops at the time, the research incident to making the ultraviolet lamp resulted in the discovery of a totally new type of glass, now the standard in thousands of scientific and industrial applications of ultraviolet light. The original batch of five hundred pounds was melted at the Carr-Lowry Glass Company in Baltimore, under Wood’s supervision. Corning at about the same time developed a similar glass independently, but later changed their batch formula as the result of suggestions from Kettering of the General Motors research laboratories, who had been in communication with Wood.

While Wood was experimenting on this new glass, he was troubled by the fact that he was spending too much of the government’s money on crucibles for melting small batch samples. In an attempt to economize, he found he could replace this costly laboratory ware with unglazed coffee cups, which could be had from a local pottery in gross lots at a few cents apiece.

He was just beginning to congratulate himself on his thriftiness when the government forced him to spend $30,000 merely to prove he was right when he insisted on the impossibility of making a hot-air sausage balloon!

Of this episode, Wood says: