Wood, meanwhile, had been trying it with the spectroscope. The sample was in liquid form, of a light amber color. Photographing its absorption spectrum with ultraviolet light, he had discovered — somewhat to his surprise — that it did indeed eliminate the harmful rays from sunlight. From his knowledge of absorption spectra, his first guess was that it must be a solution of salicylic acid. From his knowledge of chemistry, he knew that if his guess was right, the solution would turn blue when treated with ferric chloride. He tried this — and found his guess was wrong. The mysterious solution remained the same color as before. On the following morning, however, lo and behold, the watch glass on which the test had been made was covered with a crystallized layer of long black needles which shone with a brilliant metallic luster!
“Now where,” said Dr. Wood to himself, “have I seen those before?” And since he has the memory of the proverbial Hindu elephant — “Where indeed but in that little bottle put away long years ago when I was but a pup!”
The crystals were the same old quinhydrone, and, quod erat demonstrandum, the pig in a poke was no new chemical substance, but the same old hydroquinone used by every photographer — unmasked by what it had done when dosed with ferric chloride.
“So that’s what it is,” Wood told the cosmetic magnate. “You can buy all you want of it cheaply at any drug supply house — and it does just what that doctor said it would — but if you mix it with any of your skin creams or beach lotions, God help the gals who use it! ”
“Why?” said the cold-cream king.
“Because,” said Wood, “it’s a skin irritant, and photographers use rubber gloves when they mess about with it.”
That ended it for the big manufacturer, but later on the New York doctor’s “discovery” was promoted by a “beauty specialist,” and all the women at a certain seaside resort broke out with a frightful skin rash, after which the discovery and discoverer disappeared into oblivion.
In January, 1892, Robert’s father died. After due reflection Robert decided to cut short his studies at Johns Hopkins and get married that coming April. In the meantime he had been playing hooky more and more from chemistry, running over continually to Rowland’s laboratory in the physics building, and had “bothered Rowland almost to death” trying out all sorts of extracurricular things there. He wanted to spend part of the wedding trip in Alaska, and went over one day to ask Rowland, who had been up there, some questions about Alaskan travel — and incidentally to say good-by and thank him.
Rowland was a gruff great man, laconic.
“What d’you want to find out about Alaska for?”
“Well,” Wood said, shifting from one foot to the other, “I’m leaving for California next week to get married, and I want to include Alaska in our wedding trip…
“Huh,” said Rowland with a snort, “tried everything else. Going to try that now, are you?”
So Robert Williams Wood, no longer Junior, was married to Gertrude Ames on the nineteenth of April, 1892, in San Francisco. He was twenty-four, six feet tall, square-jawed, blue-eyed, dominant, handsome as Lucifer. She was younger, slender, lovely, above the medium in height, with an abundance of honey-colored hair. It was an indissoluble marriage.
Accustomed, both of them, to all the luxuries, they began their wedding journey (via the hotels at Monterey and Santa Barbara) with a camping trip to the King’s River Canyon, three hundred miles from any railroad, mostly on horseback, carrying no beds but only their blanket rolls and a tent, with a strange roughneck nicknamed the “Dancing Bear” for guide and packman. He was said to be an English fugitive from justice. He was squat and powerful, less than five feet high, with a brown-red beard cut to a blunt point, giving him a bearlike profile. His hands hung nearly to his knees. Reversing Kipling’s crack at Russia, he was the man that walked like a bear. As a lady’s maid, he must have been a marvel. They started from Moore’s Lumber Mills, where they’d obtained the horses and provisions, and went deep into the canyon. They made camp with couches of pine branches and a stove built with stones, lived mostly on bacon, pan bread, and trout from the stream.
Even for his wedding trip, Wood had not overlooked the possibilities of chemical foolishness. One of the chemicals which Remsen’s students had to prepare was fluorescein, that remarkable substance, a speck of which the size of a pinhead dissolved in a barrel of water will cause it to glow in the sunshine with a brilliant emerald-green light. Aviators shot down in the ocean in the present war are using it to create an enormous green spot on the surface of the water, easily seen by rescue planes.
The Yellowstone Park, which he had visited the year before, was to be included in the itinerary, and it occurred to Wood that Old Faithful geyser would be a real spectacle if heavily charged with fluorescein. So he made a pint of the material in the form of a thick dark-brown sirupy mass, tightly corked in a wide-mouthed bottle, enough to make a small lake fluorescent, and stored it in his baggage.
On the way East, after adventures from California to Alaska and back, they made the grand tour of the Yellowstone, and Wood got ready for the geyser with his bottle of fluorescein. Of this episode, he says:
We found Old Faithful too well watched by the guards to accomplish anything there, but I remembered an even better spot, the celebrated Emerald Spring. A big party of tourists with a guide was about to start on foot for it, but I knew the way and we two started ahead of them, and found the great spring deserted. A strong flow of water was coming up from the depths of the funnel, and as soon as we heard the voices of the tourists, I uncorked the bottle of fluorescein and threw it into the center of the pool. Down it went deeper and deeper until it was lost to view, leaving a green trail to mark its path. Nothing happened for a minute or two, and then there rolled up slowly from the depths a great cumulus cloud like a thunderhead of a dazzling green color, which grew larger and more complicated in form as it neared the surface, and by the time the tourists arrived, the whole pool was glowing in the hot sunshine with the brilliance and color of an emerald. We heard the guide intoning monotonously his patter: “This here, ladies and gentlemen, is the Emerald Spring, so called from the greenish color of — my God, I’ve never seen it like this, and I’ve been here ten years!” The tourists were entranced, and so were we.
Since marriage had increased his expenses and responsibilities, and since he was a practical New Englander despite his fantasies, the young man began looking around for some not too costly way of continuing his studies. The then newly formed University of Chicago suggested itself to his mind. It was being publicized as the most lavish academic set-up of all time. Rumor had it that the catalogue weighed fourteen pounds, and that it contained reference to three courses in chemistry — all devoted to compounds which didn’t even exist! So Wood applied for a job, and got it in the autumn of 1892, after what I would call his honeymoon. (He detests the word. His notes which covered that happy period are entitled “Travel Subsequent to Marriage”.) He had asked to become an assistant in chemistry and was appointed honorary fellow in chemistry. It was really a job as “bottle washer for Stokes”, he says — and the honor carried with it no honorarium. All it did was to give him free access to the laboratory. I want to quote at not too great a length from his notes covering the next couple of years, though there’s scarcely any mention in them of the laboratory, or of the university either for that matter. I quote because I think they throw, between the lines, additional light on his character. I have never known exactly what the phrase “practical joke” means, but I do know that a lot of practical jokers deserve to be killed with an ax. Now Robert Williams Wood, from early childhood and today in his honored maturity, plays pranks which are sometimes appalling. But there is a curious mingling of deviltry and kindness in the man which has kept him not only admired but loved by most of his butts and victims. I’m told, not by him, that their old Irish maid Sarah, for instance, viewed him as a benevolent if eccentric demigod. Here are a couple of pages lifted from his own notes on Sarah.