Monday, Dec. 24, 1951
Great Experimenter
At the head table in a banquet room of Baltimore's Hamilton Street Club one night last week, a spry, white-haired man of 83 rose, smiling and nodding, to acknowledge the cheers and applause of the guests who had come to honor him. Robert Williams Wood was in his soth year as a full professor at Johns Hopkins University, and the brightest names in the scientific world wanted to help celebrate the occasion. Albert Einstein had written to pay his respects, Niels Bohr had cabled from Copenhagen, Robert A. Millikan, Harlow Shapley and Karl Compton all sent messages. In 50 years, scientists all over the world have grown accustomed to paying tribute to Professor Wood--and Johns Hopkins has grown just as used to having him as a legend.
Physics & Foxes. The son of a Maine physician, Robert Wood began to be a legend when he was in grade school. At eight, he was giving his friends formal lectures on the anatomy of the jellyfish. At nine, he was reading Carpenter's book on microscopy. In his teens, he was sneaking physics books into his Latin classes. In school, however, he was considered a spectacular dullard. And at Harvard, almost his only claim to fame was that he once swallowed hashish and had his dreams ("I could distinctly feel myself a fox . . .") duly recorded in William James's Principles of Psychology.
It was not until 1901 that science began to take notice of Robert Wood. By that time he had studied at Johns Hopkins and at the University of Berlin, had finally settled himself into his life's work in Baltimore. The field that interested him most at the time was the problem of light. He wrote more than 250 technical papers, developed a way to photograph with ultraviolet rays, pioneered in the study of infrared. He built the largest spectroscope in the world, and his work with diffraction gratings, which could divide the spectrum into 1,000 shades, revolutionized much of astronomy and physics research. His Physical Optics became the classic work in the field; his experiments achieved such renown that the term "Wood Experiment" became a scientist's synonym for ingenuity and perfection.
Bang & Flashes. But brilliant as he was, Scientist Wood was always a very odd sort of professor. Cooped up in his cluttered laboratory, he would often forget to come to class, and his students were forever having to fetch him ("Oh, yes, yes," he would say, "but just give me a few more minutes here, will you?"). When he did come to class, his lectures were usually a series of explosions, tricks and flashing lights.
He was fascinated by gadgets. He once built himself a camera modeled on a fish eye, and wandered all over town snapping pictures, just to see what the city would "look like to a fish." He took up painting, wrote slick fiction with Arthur Train ( The Moon-Maker; The Man Who Rocked the Earth), produced a book of verse and sketches called How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers ("The awkward Auk is only known/To dwellers in the Auk-tic zone . . ."). He also became a successful sleuth. He helped police reconstruct the bomb used in the Wall Street bombing of 1920 and, after some laboratory work, led them to the man who blew up young Naomi Hall in the notorious Candy Box Murder Case.-The police began to consult him so often in baffling mysteries that his name became a regular headline--
DR. WOOD SEEKS CLUE TO NEW DEATH BOMB . . . FAMED JOHNS HOPKINS SCIENTIST CALLED IN TO AID POLICE . . . WOOD INVESTIGATES.
Pipes & Polish. When Wood reached 70, Johns Hopkins refused to let him retire: instead of making him emeritus, the university made him research professor. Today he is still in his laboratory each morning by 9:30, threading his way through a labyrinthine litter of bottles, jars, tubes, pipes, batteries and wires.
But at 83, Robert Wood is conscious of one handicap. "I've felt all along," said he last week, "that my work has been entirely experimental... I didn't have to worry about how or why it worked like it did. That had to be polished off by someone else." In 1951, scientists were still polishing the work that Robert Wood has done.
*The Wall Street bomb, hidden in a yellow, horse-drawn cart from which the driver had fled, went off before the U.S. Assay Office on Sept. 16, 1920, killing 39 persons and wounding 400. Police never found out who the driver was. The Candy Box bomb went off one December day in 1929 in the kitchen of the Hall residence in Seat Pleasant, Md. Through Wood's reconstruction of the bomb, police traced it back to a young garage mechanic in Washington, D.C.
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