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 the late autumn of 1903, Professor R. Blondlot, head of the Department of Physics at the University of Nancy, member of the French Academy, and widely known as an investigator, announced the discovery of a new ray, which he called N ray, with properties far transcending those of the X rays. Reading of his remarkable experiments with these rays in the Comptes rendus

of the Academy, the leading scientific journal of France, I attempted to repeat his observations, but failed to confirm them after wasting a whole morning. According to Blondlot, the rays were given off spontaneously by many metals. A piece of paper, very feebly illuminated, could be used as a detector, for, wonder of wonders, when the N rays fell upon the eye they increased its ability to see objects in a nearly dark room.

The flame of discovery kindled by Blondlot was now burning brightly, and fuel was added by a score of other investigators. Twelve papers had appeared in the Comptes rendus

before the year was out. A. Charpentier, famous for his fantastic experiments on hypnotism, claimed that N rays were given off by muscle, nerves, and the brain, and his incredible claims were published in the Comptes,

sponsored by the great Arsonval, France’s foremost authority on electricity and magnetism.

Blondlot next announced that he had constructed a spectroscope with aluminum lenses and a prism of the same metal, and found a spectrum of lines separated by dark intervals, showing that there were N rays of different refrangibility and wave length. He measured the wave lengths. The flame of N-ray research was now a conflagration. Jean Becquerel, son of Henri Becquerel, whose discovery of the rays from uranium had laid the foundation for the discovery of radium by the Curies, claimed that N rays could be transmitted over a wire, just as light can be transmitted along the inside of a bent glass rod by internal reflection. One end of a wire near the faintly luminous detector caused variation of its intensity as the other end, some meters away, was passed over the skull of a living person. If the subject was anesthetized with ether, the N rays from the brain first increased and then decreased as the sleep deepened. He claimed that metals could be anesthetized with ether, chloroform, or alcohol, in which condition they ceased to emit or transmit the rays. Biologists, physiologists, psychologists, chemists, botanists, and geologists climbed on the band wagon. The nerve centers of the spinal cord in their relation to disease and previous surgical operations were studied by the N rays which they emitted. The rays were given off by growing plants, vegetables, and even by a human corpse. Charpentier found the senses of hearing and smell were increased by N rays as well as the sense of sight. A tuning fork in vibration gave a powerful N ray. By early summer Blondlot had published twenty papers, Charpentier twenty, and J. Becquerel ten, all describing new properties and sources of the rays.

Nearly one hundred papers on N rays were published in the Comptes rendus in the first half of the year 1904. The N ray was polarized, magnetized, hypnotized, and tortured in all of the ways that had forced confessions from light rays — but only Frenchmen could observe the phenomena. Scientists in all other countries were frankly skeptical, in fact ridiculed these fantastic impossibilities. But the French Academy stamped Blondlot’s work with its approval by awarding him the Lalande prize of 20,000 francs and its gold medal “for the discovery of the N rays”.

During that summer we were at Beg-Meil, in Brittany, and I was out of touch with the scientific high jinks in Nancy, but in September I went over to Cambridge for the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. After the meeting some of us got together for a discussion of what was to be done about the N rays. Of our group, Professor Rubens of Berlin, with whom I had come in close contact while a student, was most outspoken in his denunciation. He felt particularly aggrieved because the Kaiser had commanded him to come to Potsdam and demonstrate the rays. After wasting two weeks in vain efforts to duplicate the Frenchman’s experiments, he was greatly embarrassed by having to confess to the Kaiser his failure. Turning to me he said, “Professor Wood, will you not go to Nancy immediately and test the experiments that are going on there?” “Yes, yes”, said all of the Englishmen, “that’s the idea, go ahead”. I suggested that Rubens go, as he was the chief victim, but he said that Blondlot had been most polite in answering his many letters asking for more detailed information, and it would not look well if he undertook to expose him. “Besides”, he added, “you are an American, and you Americans can do anything…”.