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

In Paris they had a fine time visiting laboratories, among them that of Dr. Jean Saidman, who was interested in the applications of ultraviolet light in the practice of medicine. He had much to say about Lumière Wood, which was the name the French had given it during the war. Wood says his own name is unfortunate since in translation it frequently becomes confused with the noun. An American consul in Paris once sent a report to the State Department that the French were finding important industrial applications for the light of a mercury arc passed through a “wooden screen”, his translation of “écran de Wood”. Dr. Saidman had all sorts of electrical apparatus, including an X-ray machine with a fluoroscope. Loomis had never witnessed the action of the human stomach, and the doctor politely offered to use Wood as a guinea pig. He was given a dose of barium carbonate, after which Loomis’s request was granted. Wood insisted on a mirror so that he could witness the process too.

They finally sailed for home on the Olympic.

Wood’s sensational and exciting circus methods of presenting scientific data had a queer and beautiful repercussion in 1926. The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia decided to sponsor a Christmas-week series of scientific lectures for children similar to those which Faraday had organized ninety years ago at the Royal Institution in London. Dr. Wood was invited to inaugurate the lectures with a talk on “Recreations with Radiations”.

He selected from all of the optical experiments with which he was acquainted a large assortment of the most spectacular, and in particular those which could be shown by projection, for many actual experiments can be shown in operation on a large white screen with an even greater brilliancy than that of motion pictures. From these he selected the ones which young people could understand, and arranged them in such order that a logical, continued story could be built up, beginning with the simpler ideas and going on gradually to the discussion of more difficult material. In particular, he worked out a method of projecting on the screen a much longer and more brilliant spectrum than had ever been shown before, so far as he knows. It was about a foot in width and ten feet long, the rainbow colors having a high degree of purity. With this as a background he showed numerous experiments on the absorption of light by various vapors, fluids, and solids, the bright-line emission spectra of metallic arcs, and related phenomena. A host of experiments with the brilliant-colored patterns produced by polarized light and some of his early experiments with sodium were also on the program, with the demonstration of its taking fire when thrown on water, and the story of the people who were scared to death by the “man who spit fire in a puddle”.

In the audience was nine-year-old Kern Dodge, grandson of Mrs. James Mapes Dodge and great-grandson of Mary Mapes Dodge, founder and long-time editor of St. Nicholas. The lecture had so filled this little boy with passionate joy and excitement that he went home in a sort of holy glow which set fire to his grandmother — whereupon she wrote out a check for $10,000 to endow the Christmas lectures for children and make them permanent.

Meanwhile, Wood’s scientific work was opening up new fields for study.