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

Shortly afterwards I demonstrated the effect before the research staff of the General Electric Company at Schenectady, making the vacuum tube on the spot. As I showed it here the tungsten filament was mounted in the side tube leading to the pump. The pressure was only about 1/700 of that of the atmospheric, and the atomic gas was practically at room temperature, yet the wire was kept at incandescence by a cold stream of atomic hydrogen. Dr. Langmuir was much intrigued and began to speculate on what could be accomplished with a stream of the gas at atmospheric pressure. His speculation led to an important invention, for in less than six months he took out a patent for an atomic hydrogen welding torch, which proved of immense value, since all sorts of metals could be welded in a hydrogen atmosphere without showing flaws or blowholes.

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It was as a consequence of Wood’s scientific zest and social strenuousness that fate brought him, about this time, the facilities of a great private laboratory backed by a great private fortune. He had met Alfred Loomis during the war at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, and later they became neighbors on Long Island. Loomis was a multimillionaire New York banker whose lifelong hobby had been physics and chemistry. Loomis was an amateur in the original French sense of the word, for which there is no English equivalent. During the war, he had invented the “Loomis Chronograph” for measuring the velocity of shells. Their friendship, resulting in the equipment of a princely private laboratory at Tuxedo Park, was a grand thing for them both. To say that the conjunction was like that of Leonardo da Vinci and Lorenzo the Magnificent would be a wrong comparison, since Wood’s nature is such that not even God Almighty could ever be a patron to him.

A happy collaboration began, which came to its full flower in 1924. Here is Wood’s story of what happened.

Loomis was visiting his aunts at East Hampton and called on me one afternoon, while I was at work with something or other in the barn laboratory. We had a long talk and swapped stories of what we had seen or heard of “science in warfare”. Then we got onto the subject of postwar research, and after that he was in the habit of dropping in for a talk almost every afternoon, evidently finding the atmosphere of the old barn more interesting if less refreshing than that of the beach and the country club.

One day he suggested that if I contemplated any research we might do together which required more money than the budget of the Physics Department could supply, he would like to underwrite it. I told him about Langevin’s experiments with supersonics during the war and the killing of fish at the Toulon Arsenal. It offered a wide field for research in physics, chemistry, and biology, as Langevin had studied only the high- frequency waves as a means of submarine detection. Loomis was enthusiastic, and we made a trip to the research laboratory of General Electric to discuss it with Whitney and Hull.

The resulting apparatus was built at Schenectady and installed at first in a large room in Loomis’s garage at Tuxedo Park, New York, where we worked together, killing fish and mice, and trying to find out why and how they were killed, that is whether the waves destroyed tissue or acted on the nerves or what.