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

This was discouraging. But Dr. Wood, Senior, and Rob’s mother were bent on Rob’s following family tradition and going to Harvard if possible. So they sent him next to the William Nichols Classical School, in Boston, which specialized in Latin and Greek. Rob had no interest in Latin and Greek, while Mr. Nichols had a deep distaste for science. These mutual distastes were emphasized and took on a slightly personal tinge through the episode of the circular staircase. The staircase at the Nichols School, on Temple Place, was a tight spiral with its bannisters riveted to the walls of a plastered well, like the interior of a lighthouse. All boys like to slide down bannisters, but they couldn’t slide down these because they couldn’t straddle them and they were so close to the wall that you couldn’t sit on them. Young Wood knew something about centrifugal force, and began experimenting with the balustrade. Taking a running start from the top of the steps to gather speed, he slid side saddle onto the rail and found himself coasting with increasing velocity around and around clear down to the bottom, where he landed with a bang. The other boys marveled and tried in vain to imitate the performance, but Wood would not allow them to witness the start. It was too wonderful. Centrifugal force pressed your back against the wall, giving you a firm seat, and away you went. Wood says that he has kept his eye open for a similar slide ever since, as he would like to repeat the performance.

Finally he initiated the others, with the result that in a day or two a torrent of laughing and screaming small boys poured off the last turn of the spiral landing on top of Mr. Nichols, who was just entering the street door.

Rob was given a letter to his father. Next morning he was called up before the whole school and asked what his father had said to the letter. Rob gleefully announced that he said he was glad it was nothing worse.

His progress in his own growing scientific-imagination- fostered fantasies began to reach new heights.

As one result, he concocted two elaborate hoaxes. One had no wide repercussions, but the other made a national sensation. During a summer visit to his uncle, Charles W. Davis, in Chicago, he and young Bradley Davis went fossil hunting together. There was a limestone quarry which they visited frequently, rich in Silurian fossil shells and crinoids. Once, while alone, Rob chanced on two large broken slabs of concrete, smooth on the surface, covered with rubble on the back. With a hammer and chisel, he carved on the surface of one the head of a pterodactyl, and absurdly on the other, the outline of a gigantic bug, a sort of imaginary prehistoric devil’s darning needle. Then Rob and some fellow-conspirators “planted” these in the quarry and on the next fossil-hunting expedition he ingeniously steered his young cousin Bradley to the buried treasure.

“His excitement,” said Wood, “at this rich double find was as great as that of the man who discovered gold on Sutter’s ranch in California”.

Rob photographed the “fossils” with a homemade camera and still has the faded blueprint.

The second hoax stirred up national excitement and for a short time almost rivaled the comedy of the bogus Cardiff giant. It was pure hoax, pure fantasy. One of his father’s friends had lent him a big telescope, and he had begun looking for life on Mars and other planets. He didn’t find any, but on July 23, 1887, the following amazing article, which he had concocted out of his own untrammeled imagination, appeared in the Chicago Tribune.

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