ROBERT W. WOOD
Foreword
Concerning American Small Boys and American Giants
American small boys love to invent and make things — gadgets, smells, kites, explosions, slingshots, little engines, and bean shooters. They also love to play outrageous pranks.
The essence of Robert Williams Wood is that he is a super endowed American small boy — who has never grown up. The same was true of Mark Twain both as a person and as projected in the personalities of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. The part played by environment in the development of these two American small boys (one living and one dead) who stand and will continue to stand as giants in their totally different fields runs curiously parallel. Both were supplied by fate, to test their wits and strength in early childhood, with mighty and gigantic “toys”.
In Mark Twain’s case, it was the rolling Mississippi with its rafts, floods, and steamboats, runaway slaves, robbers’ caves… you know…
In Robert Wood’s case, it was the roaring, giant Sturtevant Blower Works with its power plant, hydraulic rams, chemical vats, blast furnaces, engines, tools, and machinery, which you shall presently see.
I know Robert Wood pretty well by now, having worked and played with him for a long time, and I hope I can succeed in showing him to you as he really is. There is something fantastic, Gargantuan, Promethean about the man, but to this very day, with Wood in his early, active, robust seventies, there lurks grinning and leaps out continually from behind that fiery curtain of fantasy and scientific genius, the American small boy’s dream of himself — the American small boy who has become a great man yet has never grown up.
I keep repeating American because this Wood of mine is as American as a hickory tree. America is in the roots of him. The brightest little French or Greek boy wouldn’t have the remotest idea what he’s all about — any more than they can really understand Huck Finn. And he’s often shocked his little British cousins, though they’ve showered him with all their highest honors. No little land, indeed no other land on earth, could have produced this man.
William Seabrook
Rhinebeck, 1941
Chapter One.
Small Boy with a Gigantic Toy — Wood Starts Early at Playing with Fire — and Ice
There is a family legend that Robert Williams Wood wrote a letter to his grandmother on the day he was born. The letter in question is extant. I have read, handled, and examined it. It is dated Concord, May 2, 1868. Its obsolete paper, faded, rusty ink, et cetera, all prove the authenticity — at least — of its date. It reads:
My very dear, very good
Grandmama Wood,
Mother is not able to write today — and she therefore desires me to announce to you my arrival this morning — which was about two weeks sooner than had been expected by my friends. So that I had the satisfaction of taking them all by surprise. I had not a very long journey, although what seemed to me a rather rough one, of thirty-six hours.
I did not, however, on my arrival find myself at all fatigued, but on the contrary in most excellent health and spirits.
“What strong lungs he has got,” say my friends, “and what bright blue eyes.”
In due course of time I shall call to pay my respects to you in person, should we both live. Mother directs me to send her love to you, and to subscribe myself.
Your affectionate Grandson,
Rob’t Williams Wood, Jr.
To Mrs. Elizabeth Wood,
Augusta, Maine
This is the one and only legend concerning this great, fantastic physicist, among a thousand now world-famous in scientific circles, which he categorically denies. He confesses to Promethean pranks, conflagrations, and explosions in his early childhood, to courting his fiancée vocally across the continent with wax phonograph cylinders mailed in baking-powder cans; confesses to the cat in the spectroscope, the trained seals he persuaded the British government to use in tracking submarines; confesses even to “purloining” the purple-gold sequins from Tutankhamen’s tomb, via the Cairo Museum — but denies that he wrote the above letter.
He said to me last summer, “I have never subjected it to my ultraviolet light tests now in general use on dubious manuscripts, but I am convinced that the signature is not mine. As a matter of fact, from certain internal evidence, I believe that the entire letter constitutes a forgery committed by my father”.[1]
If the letter was not authentic, it was at any rate miraculously prophetic. All his life, he has been arriving “sooner than had been expected.” Concerning some of his greatest scientific achievements, later rediscovered and cashed in on by others, the Scientific American had an article not so long ago entitled “Too Soon is as Bad as Too Late.” His pyrotechnic originality is still continually “taking people by surprise” and he is so hyperkinetic that he never seems to know fatigue. He was seventy in May, 1938, and would normally have been retired as head of the Physics Department at Johns Hopkins University. Instead of his being retired as “Emeritus” he was appointed Research Professor of Physics at the same university, and is going stronger than ever. Last summer, 1940, when I was with the Woods at East Hampton, he had just been awarded the Draper Medal by the National Academy of Science, for work which he has done, since his retirement, in so improving diffraction gratings that they are now replacing prisms in the great star spectrographs of the larger observatories. Current gossip about him in Europe has been that most younger associates who worked with him over there broke down from exhaustion and were obliged to take a rest cure every couple of months while he worked on.
The old adage that the child is father to the man has never had a more astounding confirmation than in the case of Wood. By the age of eight, he had already become a sort of potential triple cross with the characteristics of an infantile Prometheus, a poltergeist, and Crile’s Irish Elk. Put in simpler words, the embryonic scientist was a holy terror. He is to this day. In the midst of my work with him at their East Hampton place last summer, the disturbingly beautiful but even more disturbingly not dumb Marya Mannes, daughter of David Mannes (now Mrs. Richard Blow), who had known the Woods intimately since she was sixteen, said to me, patting one of Wood’s bony, powerful, extraordinary hands affectionately:
“You ought to enjoy this work. It’s right up your alley, isn’t it?”
I said, “What do you mean?”
She said, “Haven’t you generally written about savages, cannibal kings, and wild men?”
I said, “I wouldn’t be the one to write a biography about a tame man. I wouldn’t know how.”
Wood is full of a sort of detached affection and kindliness, but he has no deep respect for and no humility toward anything on earth or in the starry heavens except the laws of nature. He has no fear of man or God, or anything — except perhaps occasionally Mrs. Wood.
It is no mere “legend” but a fact in family history that at the age of eight, Wood gave a lecture on the anatomy of jellyfish, illustrated with magic-lantern slides which he himself had redrawn from the pictures in the scientific treatise by Agassiz. They had given him a magic lantern to play with, with a few colored slides. He had tired of the clowns and angels, and had made his own slides as substitutes. The lecture was given in the dining-room, with some of the neighbors’ children and their mothers present.
1
A separate book might be written about the father, who if he were still alive would not be taking this aspersion lying down. He was born April 22, 1803, and had been twice around the Horn before 1840. This was in the days when “Died in Pernambuco” occurred on the tombstones of bodies which had been brought home to Nantucket, New Bedford, and Boston. The South Pacific was a suburb of New England towns whose railed cupolas looked out over the sea. This grand old scholar and adventurer, worthy sire of a great, fantastic son, was born in Stowe, Maine, son of Joseph Wood and Betsy Williams; graduated from Waterville College (now Colby University) 1829, and from Bowdoin College Medical School 1832. Sailed from Boston for Hawaiian Islands October, 1838, arrived April, 1839 (around the Horn). By appointment of the American Consul was for ten years in charge of the American Hospital for Seamen in Honolulu. For twenty years subsequently was engaged in the growing and manufacture of sugar, a pioneer and the first financially successful one, in the introduction of this industry into the Hawaiian Islands. He retired from the Islands in 1866 and retired from all business in 1879. Married (June 4, 1833) Delia Morse, daughter of Samuel A. Morse, for many years Collector of Customs at Machias and subsequently of Eastport, Maine. Second marriage was to Lucy Jane Davis (October 31, 1864), daughter of Charles B. Davis of Concord, Massachusetts. They lived in Honolulu for two years, then a year in Europe. Robert, Junior, was born May 2, 1868, in the Davis home in Concord. They lived in Concord for four years in the Davis home, as Grandmother Davis was a bedridden invalid. After her death, they moved to Jamaica Plain, a suburb of Boston. In 1868, year of Wood, Junior’s, birth, Dr. Wood, Senior, again sailed for Honolulu. His ostensible purpose was to collect biological material for Louis Agassiz, of which he brought back plenty before the year was out — but it amuses me to imagine that he may have been fleeing from the “lusty lungs” of his Gargantuan son. Those lungs still contain a lot of noble wind about the father. I wanted to hold the father in a footnote, and am still trying to, but here’s what Wood added—and there’s still more to come. While Wood, Senior, was in charge of the American Hospital for Seamen at Honolulu, a Russian warship anchored and the admiral came ashore. The admiral was entertained frequently by Dr. Wood. On the night of their last dinner, they exchanged keepsakes — a little gift from Dr. Wood to the admiral, and a little gift from the admiral to Dr. Wood. Next morning Wood received with the admiral’s compliments a valuable book which he’d chanced to admire on the flagship. These Woods are well bred, but tough. Wood tore from the wall and boxed up an oil painting which was worth five times as much as the book — and which the admiral had chanced to admire. Wood had his servant deliver it to a petty officer with instructions that it was not to be given the admiral until the ship had cleared port. The ship duly cleared —but put about and dropped anchor off Diamond Head. A cutter came ashore and a box was handed to the harbor master, addressed to Dr. Wood. It contained a cup of solid platinum, worth many times its weight in gold. The warship had meanwhile weighed anchor and disappeared. The father of Wood, perhaps for the only time in his life, was licked. Here comes the last of his father, and if it doesn’t give you goose flesh, it’s because I can’t write. Wood, Senior, lay sick abed in 1892, at the age of ninety. Old age was his only illness. But old age had laid its hand upon him. After a number of days, he arose on his pillow and said in a loud, strong voice, "I want to give up the ghost!” He lay back and died of old age with a terrible if unconventional dignity which gives to think of Captain Ahab and the Whale.